Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 08 May 2015, at 04:04, Bruce Kellett wrote: Russell Standish wrote: On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:45:12PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: ... I am sorry, but this just does not follow. The original physical functionality is admitted to be still intact -- provide, admittedly, by the projected movie, but that is still a physical device, operating with a physical film in a physical projector, and projecting on to the original (albeit damaged) physical machinery. How has the physical element in all of this been rendered redundant? The original functionality of the 'brain' has been preserved by the movie; the conscious experience is still intact even though much of the original functionality has been provided by another external physical device. How does this differ from the original Yes Doctor scenario in which the subject agrees to have his brain replaced by a physical device that simulates (emulates) his original brain functionality? I submit that it does not. The only difference between the movie replacing the functionality of the original experience and having that functionality replaced by a computer would seem to be that the computer can emulate a wider range of conscious experiences -- it is 'counterfactually correct' in that it can respond appropriately to different external inputs. The film, being a static record of one conscious experience, cannot do this. But it has been admitted that the film can reproduce the original conscious experience with perfect fidelity. And the film is every bit as physical as the original 'brain'. So the physical has not been shown to be redundant. It cannot be cut away with Occam's razor after all. If it were, there would be no conscious experience remaining. I conclude that the MGA fails to establish the conclusions that it purports to establish. Thanks for this excellent summary, Bruce. The answer given as to why the film is supposedly not conscious is that it absurd. I agree with you that it is not, prima facie, absurd at this point. Usually, Bruno then goes on to recount his stroboscope argument, which is in his thesis, but not in any English language publication to my knowledge. Essentially the idea is that we stop the projector, take the film out and lay it down on a very large table. Now as an observer, we can run along the table, seeing the frames of the film in their original order, and it will be as though the film is projected. But that would mean the conscious moment would depend on whether the external observer is running or not. Thanks for you comments and clarification. I felt that, at the point indicated, there were a couple of paragraphs missing -- something which bridged the gap between removing the physical functionality of the original brain and concluding that the physical brain was not necessary. Your summary of the stroboscopic argument above helps fill this gap. The argument is, as has been said, an appeal to the intuition that the point reached is absurd. But this is a very weak link to the conclusion. Another intuition could reach a quite different conclusion. Indeed, my intuition does. This is because, as you have noted, the recoding on the film does not create a new conscious moment, it merely replays one that already existed. The recording might be timeless, but then so is the original conscious experience if viewed as part of the block universe. This is not to say that time is not essential for the experience, it is just the fact that time is included in the block in a comprehensible way. So laying the film out and viewing it by walking along means that the sequence of brain states is replayed in real time -- the original conscious experience is still there, but it is the *same* experience, not something new. By extension, the film is then another timeless record of the conscious experience, just as the trace of the original brain in the block universe. So the intuition that says that we have reached an absurd positon, is an impoverished intuition. Personally, I think the problem started much earlier, in supposing that that recreating the exact same sequence of physical states instantiates more conscious moments. It does not. The conscious moment is exactly the same, and exists in that physical reality. Creating a recording does not change that fact. That seems to be a central observation. Such a view underlies what I said above. The only problem I see is if the recording were to arise by chance, by some lucky coincidence of the random motion of molecules, without the original computation having taken place. Then is that conscious moment instantiated? Obviously, in a robust ontology, it is, because all conscious moments are instantiated, but suppose the ontology is not robust. I don't see this as a difficulty. The random assembly of molecules might create a conscious brain that exists for a fleeting instant and has novel experiences. Just think of
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
On 5/7/2015 11:24 PM, Jason Resch wrote: If the string of bits is all that is required for conscious, then the cable connected to the camera, or the optic nerve would be visually conscious. But I think those bits need to be interpreted, by the Mars Rover's software, or by the visual cortex, for there to be visual quaila. You know they have been so interpreted when the Rover maneuvers around the rock it saw. Brent The bits alone are not enough. Otherwise sqrt(2) or Pi might as well be theories of everything. Jason On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:19 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/7/2015 11:10 PM, Jason Resch wrote: Recordings, absent interpretation, are devoid of meaning and don't exist for anyone (like the unheard tree fall). Absent interpretation any string of bits is meaningless because depending on how it is interpreted it could mean anything (see one time pad encryption). Consciousness requires both information and something to be informed, Something to be informed is just a ghost in the machine. All that's required is that the information, the string of bits, refer to something, something that can be interacted with. This is easily seen in my favorite example of the AI Mars Rover. The string of bits represents There's a big rock in front of me because it leads to maneuvering around the rock. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 08 May 2015, at 05:08, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: To summarise the summary... Hypothetically, we have some computing machine that generates a conscious experience. Since computation is deterministic, this will create the /same/ conscious experience if we re-run it duplicating the same initial state and inputs. (For example, each run might give rise to the following report I awoke and found myself on a hillside, saw a white rabbit run past, thought it was odd that it was wearing a waistcoat and carrying a pocket watch, answered my mobile phone, and now I'm speaking to you.) Now we remove unused parts of the machinery, and verify that running it produces the same output. Then we remove arbitrary amounts of the processing machanism, which we replace with recordings of their output. Ultimately we remove the entire machine and play back a recording of the state of every component, and, we assume, get the same output as we did when the machinery was performing computations. (We may even turn the recording into a static film, or a book of instructions, and require that an external observer brings the consciousness to life through their actions.) The question is, what - if anything - does this prove? Possible answer (it seems to me) include: 1. it shows that consciousness doesn't exist 2. it shows that a recording can be conscious 3. it shows that a recording can /appear/ conscious (but then at which point in the removal process did the machine stop being conscious?) 4. it shows that physical supervenience is impossible, and hence consciousness isn't the result of computation 5. it shows that physical supervenience is impossible, and hence, if consciousness /is/ the result of computation, it can't be supported by a physical machine. Any others I've missed? I doubt that it actually /shows/ anything, apart from the fact that intuition is an unreliable guide to scientific truth. As I sais some time ago, it is an argument from incredulity, and that is not a valid argument about anything. All argument in math are from incredulity. Here we are asked to believe in an incredible, magical, non Turing emulable property of primary matter (never observed) to select the computation in arithmetic. The argument is non credible, because it makes the Yes Doctor relying on adding some magic in the picture. You can save any theory on reality by that type of moves. You must just understand that the computation are already emulated in arithmetic (which you have admitted not seeing at all). It is only a new recent fashion on this list to take seriously that a recording can be conscious, because for a logician, that error is the (common) confusion between the finger and the moon, or between 2+2=4 and 2+2=4. Bruno Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 7:28 AM, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 May 2015, at 04:19, Bruce Kellett wrote: Counterfactual correctness has not been shown to be necessary -- it is just an ad hoc move to save the argument. Counterfactual correctness is the bone of what *is* a computation. To have a computation, you need a universal system capable of understanding instruction of the type IF A THEN B, ELSE C. The local truth of the C act must be caused by the local falsity of the A predicate. The computation is in the semantic of those type of truth, at some level description of yourself. This is not necessary for computation. It would occur only in a program that required branching at some point if the input at that stage differed. Computation is perfectly possible without this requirement. If you have a simple linear program that computes an output for each input, then a recording of the action for any particular input, when replayed, would reconstruct that computation exactly. Counterfactual correctness is not required in such simple cases. And likewise, it is not required in more complicated situations, such as where there is a loop, say, that requires different actions on different iterations of the loop. The whole calculation, and hence its recording, follows all these iterations, and the recording reproduces them all exactly. If this program instantiates a conscious moment, or a whole conscious life, replaying the recording recreates that moment or life. Just as a recording of an orchestral symphony reproduces each bar of the symphony as well as the whole, following exactly the fact that each instrument plays different notes and sequences of notes in different contexts in the score. Conterfactual correctness is just a distraction. Recordings, absent interpretation, are devoid of meaning and don't exist for anyone (like the unheard tree fall). Absent interpretation any string of bits is meaningless because depending on how it is interpreted it could mean anything (see one time pad encryption). Consciousness requires both information and something to be informed, a recording on playback lacks an interpreter, and hence nothing is informed by it. Interpretation requires computation. A recording of a computation performs no interpretation. Jason You can't question the actors in a James Bond movie and expect to get anything sensible, of course. But then, no one is suggesting that a movie of someone's face records the basis of their consciousness. The movie in question is a recording of the basic brain processes (at the necessary substitution level). This, when replayed, recreates the conscious moment -- not a new conscious moment, as you point out, but a conscious moment nonetheless. The existence of the movie (perhaps with the checking that it *is* a computation) might be used to prove that the computation exist, and consciousness can be associated ... with the computation, but not with the description of the computation itself. But physical syupervenience would imply that, and so it is just wrong that consciousness supervene on a brain or a computer. It supervenes of the mathematical computation that a physical computer can incarnate, if the physical is the winner on the sum of all computations below the substitution level. If it did not, then the original comp argument fails -- we could not replace all or part of our brain with a device performing the same operations. We did assume that a computer is needed, for the local manifestation of my consciousness. At this stage, assuming it is has to be primitively physical is begging the question. What does beg the question is your assumption that the physical substrate, be it primitive or not, can be dispensed with. MGA does not establish that either the original computer, or the recording of its operation run on another physical device, can simply be disregarded. If you take away both the physical device and the record player, then you no longer have the conscious moment and/or life. Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 08 May 2015, at 05:25, PGC wrote: On Friday, May 8, 2015 at 4:56:54 AM UTC+2, Liz R wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 14:04, Bruce Kellett bhke...@optusnet.com.au wrote: Which was rather my conclusion. Since the MGA is not a rigorous argument, it was always of very limited utility -- it certainly is insufficient to carry the weight of the conclusion that the physical substrate is unnecessary for consciousness. I suggested several conclusions. Do you think any of them potentially carry any weight? I don't see a single valid argument against the incompatibility between comp assumption and physical supervenience reached by MGA. Without more rigorous distinction between informal notion of recording and formal notion of Universal Number actualizing computation, or implications of Church's thesis bearing on this, such discourse will be the obvious result. But such a valid argument against incompatibility, therefore weakness or failure of the argument, is easy to miss with all the ideological hand waving purported to show some flaw, problem, or weakness when these mostly boil down to insisting that comp hypothesis is not true or that MGA is weak when slipping glitchy, informal and unspecified notions of recording and robust, implying their formality without backing it up, into the discussion. Not having time to even read all of it, I also think that Bruno spoon feeding everybody here and being lectured by Bruce on his teaching methodology is cheap; especially considering that Bruno offers his time and effort into answering for free, and out of good faith in informal scientific exchange. In short, I don't have time to read and therefore understand all of it, but with all the lowbrow moves, it seems redundant and beside the point. The truth or falsity of comp is not the issue here. If you can prove such formally, then go publish or show the goods here at least. PGC Zombie Ninja over and out. Yes, it is weird, and made by people who show have no idea of what a computation is. Eveb if there were something valid in Bruce argument, it is would not been completed without a theory explaining what is that primary matter, and how it select the computation, in a way which is what? both Turing emulable (if not comp is false) and non Turing emulable (if not, the selection is done also in arithmetic). As you say, it is just hand waving by people having no idea of what computation are. Bruce sum up lacks the main part of the argument, and speculate on a magical God saving the physical supervenience, and this just to not address the comp mind-body problem, presupposing aristotle theology. It is a dogmatic defense of a dogma. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 08 May 2015, at 02:15, LizR wrote: Nicely summarised. I may have comments once I've had a chance to digest your summary (and any subsequent comments). In the meantime, if you aren't familiar with Maudlin's Olimpia argument that is also (possibly) relevant. It uses a similar form of argument to the MGA to arrive at a different consclusion, namely that supervenience of consciousness on a physical machine (brain, computer) isn't possible. But that is the same conclusion than MGA. Both MGA and Maudlin shows that there is a serious difficulty in maintaining both comp and the physical supervenience. Maudlin leans toward abandoning comp, I keep comp and lean toward abandoning materialism. But both show their incompatibility. Bruno (In summary, he attempts to show that physical supervenience implies that a machine running an AI programme is conscious if and only if the machine is capable of supporting counterfactual states, even if it is performing physically identical actions to one that isn't.) http://web.csulb.edu/~cwallis/labs/stanford/Computationconsc.pdf On 8 May 2015 at 11:08, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:45:12PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: ... I am sorry, but this just does not follow. The original physical functionality is admitted to be still intact -- provide, admittedly, by the projected movie, but that is still a physical device, operating with a physical film in a physical projector, and projecting on to the original (albeit damaged) physical machinery. How has the physical element in all of this been rendered redundant? The original functionality of the 'brain' has been preserved by the movie; the conscious experience is still intact even though much of the original functionality has been provided by another external physical device. How does this differ from the original Yes Doctor scenario in which the subject agrees to have his brain replaced by a physical device that simulates (emulates) his original brain functionality? I submit that it does not. The only difference between the movie replacing the functionality of the original experience and having that functionality replaced by a computer would seem to be that the computer can emulate a wider range of conscious experiences -- it is 'counterfactually correct' in that it can respond appropriately to different external inputs. The film, being a static record of one conscious experience, cannot do this. But it has been admitted that the film can reproduce the original conscious experience with perfect fidelity. And the film is every bit as physical as the original 'brain'. So the physical has not been shown to be redundant. It cannot be cut away with Occam's razor after all. If it were, there would be no conscious experience remaining. I conclude that the MGA fails to establish the conclusions that it purports to establish. Thanks for this excellent summary, Bruce. The answer given as to why the film is supposedly not conscious is that it absurd. I agree with you that it is not, prima facie, absurd at this point. Usually, Bruno then goes on to recount his stroboscope argument, which is in his thesis, but not in any English language publication to my knowledge. Essentially the idea is that we stop the projector, take the film out and lay it down on a very large table. Now as an observer, we can run along the table, seeing the frames of the film in their original order, and it will be as though the film is projected. But that would mean the conscious moment would depend on whether the external observer is running or not. Personally, I think the problem started much earlier, in supposing that that recreating the exact same sequence of physical states instantiates more conscious moments. It does not. The conscious moment is exactly the same, and exists in that physical reality. Creating a recording does not change that fact. The only problem I see is if the recording were to arise by chance, by some lucky coincidence of the random motion of molecules, without the original computation having taken place. Then is that conscious moment instantiated? Obviously, in a robust ontology, it is, because all conscious moments are instantiated, but suppose the ontology is not robust. Personally, I think the intuituion pump has simply run dry at that point. I don't think the MGA helps. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
If the string of bits is all that is required for conscious, then the cable connected to the camera, or the optic nerve would be visually conscious. But I think those bits need to be interpreted, by the Mars Rover's software, or by the visual cortex, for there to be visual quaila. The bits alone are not enough. Otherwise sqrt(2) or Pi might as well be theories of everything. Jason On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:19 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/7/2015 11:10 PM, Jason Resch wrote: Recordings, absent interpretation, are devoid of meaning and don't exist for anyone (like the unheard tree fall). Absent interpretation any string of bits is meaningless because depending on how it is interpreted it could mean anything (see one time pad encryption). Consciousness requires both information and something to be informed, Something to be informed is just a ghost in the machine. All that's required is that the information, the string of bits, refer to something, something that can be interacted with. This is easily seen in my favorite example of the AI Mars Rover. The string of bits represents There's a big rock in front of me because it leads to maneuvering around the rock. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 08 May 2015, at 01:08, Russell Standish wrote: On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:45:12PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: ... I am sorry, but this just does not follow. The original physical functionality is admitted to be still intact -- provide, admittedly, by the projected movie, but that is still a physical device, operating with a physical film in a physical projector, and projecting on to the original (albeit damaged) physical machinery. How has the physical element in all of this been rendered redundant? The original functionality of the 'brain' has been preserved by the movie; the conscious experience is still intact even though much of the original functionality has been provided by another external physical device. How does this differ from the original Yes Doctor scenario in which the subject agrees to have his brain replaced by a physical device that simulates (emulates) his original brain functionality? I submit that it does not. The only difference between the movie replacing the functionality of the original experience and having that functionality replaced by a computer would seem to be that the computer can emulate a wider range of conscious experiences -- it is 'counterfactually correct' in that it can respond appropriately to different external inputs. The film, being a static record of one conscious experience, cannot do this. But it has been admitted that the film can reproduce the original conscious experience with perfect fidelity. And the film is every bit as physical as the original 'brain'. So the physical has not been shown to be redundant. It cannot be cut away with Occam's razor after all. If it were, there would be no conscious experience remaining. I conclude that the MGA fails to establish the conclusions that it purports to establish. Thanks for this excellent summary, Bruce. The answer given as to why the film is supposedly not conscious is that it absurd. I agree with you that it is not, prima facie, absurd at this point. Usually, Bruno then goes on to recount his stroboscope argument, which is in his thesis, but not in any English language publication to my knowledge. Essentially the idea is that we stop the projector, take the film out and lay it down on a very large table. Now as an observer, we can run along the table, seeing the frames of the film in their original order, and it will be as though the film is projected. But that would mean the conscious moment would depend on whether the external observer is running or not. Personally, I think the problem started much earlier, in supposing that that recreating the exact same sequence of physical states instantiates more conscious moments. It does not. The conscious moment is exactly the same, and exists in that physical reality. Creating a recording does not change that fact. The only problem I see is if the recording were to arise by chance, by some lucky coincidence of the random motion of molecules, without the original computation having taken place. Then is that conscious moment instantiated? Obviously, in a robust ontology, it is, because all conscious moments are instantiated, but suppose the ontology is not robust. Personally, I think the intuituion pump has simply run dry at that point. I don't think the MGA helps. No, MGA really does show that either you need that neuron have prescience, or that a recording is conscious in realtime, which is absurd (as showed by a second unclothing of the movie, or better with the stroboscope, or with maudlin which can be used to get any physical activity for any computations. It does show that that you cannot keep comp and the physical supervenience, without making primary matter into a god-of-the-gap. What Bruce does not seem to see is only that arithmetic already run the computations (unlike the babel library or the normal real numbers which produce only the description of computation: it is more like in the garden of forking path than the library of babel. MGA proves this. Then you can indeed logically keep comp and physical supervenience, like a creationist can keep evolution and God made it all. MGA shows that you have to abandon rationalism to keep comp and physical supervenience. It is just that rationalism is implicitly assume (in science). Bruno -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
On 5/7/2015 11:10 PM, Jason Resch wrote: Recordings, absent interpretation, are devoid of meaning and don't exist for anyone (like the unheard tree fall). Absent interpretation any string of bits is meaningless because depending on how it is interpreted it could mean anything (see one time pad encryption). Consciousness requires both information and something to be informed, Something to be informed is just a ghost in the machine. All that's required is that the information, the string of bits, refer to something, something that can be interacted with. This is easily seen in my favorite example of the AI Mars Rover. The string of bits represents There's a big rock in front of me because it leads to maneuvering around the rock. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 07 May 2015, at 14:45, Bruce Kellett wrote: We can use an original biological brain, or an equivalent digital replacement -- it does not make any significant difference to the argument. The first point is that in some conscious experience, be it a dream or anything else, there might be a portion of the 'brain' (in quotes because it can be biological or digital) that is not activated, so this can be removed without affecting the conscious experience. This idea of removing unused parts of brain so only active elements remain, seems problematic to me and not just because of counterfactual correctness. The ability to do this is implicit in the assumption that the physics of the brain is classical. If the brain is quantum then you can't remove parts and maintain the same states, quantum states include the counterfactuals. Tegmark and others have shown that the neural signaling in the brain is essentially classical. But the Na and K ions moving across the membrane are quantum objects. What makes the signalling essentially classical is that the active parts are embedded in a large, hot environment. Basic physics is quantum. So I'm bothered when the argument that it is impossible for consciousness to supervene of the physical assumes that the physical is classical. The classical is an emergent approximation (we think) to a more basic quantum field theory. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 8 May 2015 at 18:24, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 May 2015, at 02:15, LizR wrote: Nicely summarised. I may have comments once I've had a chance to digest your summary (and any subsequent comments). In the meantime, if you aren't familiar with Maudlin's Olimpia argument that is also (possibly) relevant. It uses a similar form of argument to the MGA to arrive at a different consclusion, namely that supervenience of consciousness on a physical machine (brain, computer) isn't possible. But that is the same conclusion than MGA. Sorry, yes, I was too hasty here. I gave what I believe to be the differences between your and Madlin's conclusions in another post: 4. it shows that physical supervenience is impossible, and hence consciousness isn't the result of computation (Maudlin) 5. it shows that physical supervenience is impossible, and hence, if consciousness *is* the result of computation, it can't be supported by a physical machine (Bruno) Post in haste, regret at leisure. I often dash off a post in a short break when I should really be doing something else. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On 08 May 2015, at 03:00, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 07:59, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 7, 2015 Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: When a recording of consciousness is played back does the consciousness exist during the playback or just when the computer was actually making calculations? If computationalism is true, and I think it is, then the answer to that question doesn't make any subjective difference whatsoever. Exactly. That was one of my points. It was? Well that simplifies things considerably because I was only trying to make 2 key points and that was one of them, the other was that Bruno's and your entire argument hinges on the existence of a computer made of MATTER that operates according to PHYSICAL law. Only to start with, however. Eventually, it purports to show that those assumptions are unnecessary. Not just unnecessary, but that they use primary matter as a god-of- the-gap, like the atheists usually criticize the creationist. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On 07 May 2015, at 00:26, meekerdb wrote: On 5/6/2015 10:32 AM, John Clark wrote: You said the dovetailer leads to an irreduciable indeterminism, but if the machine is finite then a faster but still finite computer could predict what the dovetailer will do; it still could not of course predict what you will see nex Even worse it cannot predict even the probabilities that a given states of consciousness (or the universe as a whole) is followed by some other state, because the UD would have to reach a point from which it would not revisit the given state again and change the statistics of the successor states. But this is never the case for the non-terminating programs. Every state may be visited infinitely many times as the UD runs and so the statistics are always subject to change. Not at all. By the first person invariance for the delays, the statistics are defined at the limit. Of course one may say there must be a class of states that are statistically stable and there must be a finite measure for them - but only if the theory is true. Which is the point. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On 08 May 2015, at 05:40, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 01:21:10PM +1200, LizR wrote: Another possibility - suppose we develop AIs, and they boostrap themselves into benig vastly cleverer than us - might they not design conscious experiences that have never been experienced before directly, as an art form, say? Brave new world started this trend with the feelies. The trend might go something like Books and recorded/invented experiences reenacted live (plays etc) - primitive VR (lose yourself in a good book) Recorded sound Recorded vision Sound and vision Recordings of experiences through the senses (tapping into nerve channels) Ditto including emotions Ditto including thoughts All of the above, created de novo by artists and/or computer programmes There is no problem if created by computer programs. After all, COMP is the assumption that this is possible. What is the problem is if these new thoughties pop into existence on their own without any process leading up to them. That might be seen perhaps as a weakness of the Boltzman brain notion, but not of the arithmetical UD, which not only makes the programs, but respect a non trivial, purely computer science theoretical redundancy, giving sense to the measure, that we recover in the math part with the sigma_1 restriction. Bruno -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On 08 May 2015, at 02:35, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 10:19:48AM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 10:14, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 03:14:42AM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Why can't playing the equivalent of a recording made de novo (i.e. there was no original) instantiate the conscious moment for the first time? That is such a fantastically improbable outcome that Harry Potter universes are mundane occurrences, and we might as well admit magic into our explanations of reality. Seriously, in that case, all bets are off. Arguments based on intuition (such as the MGA) just fail under those circumstances. I don't think it is fantastically improbable; in fact, in an infinite universe it may be certain. And even if it is fantastically improbable, that does not invalidate the philosophical conclusions. Yes it does, if the philosophical conclusions are based on an intuition (which the MGA is). This is why I draw the comparison with the Chinese room. If all the intelligence is encoded in a book, then intuition says that book cannot be conscious. This intuition is undoubtedly right for the sorts of books we're used to. But for a book that is much, much larger than the visible universe (which it would have to be to encode the intelligence needed to answer the questions in Chinese as a lookup table), then I think that intuition is very much doubtful. Consequently, the Chinese Room argument fails. This was Dan Dennett's point, IIRC. No, because the chinese room use only the program of the chinese man, not necessarily a giant look-up table. The MGA will fail in exactly the same way, in the same circumstance. However, Bruno is quite clear that he doesn't rely on astronomically improbably event ocurring, so this is simply a side issue that needs pinching off. MGA is a definite proof that someone keeping comp and physical supervenience has to invoke non Turing emulable activity in the brain necessary for consciousness. This is not logically absurd, but is still *magic in the comp frame. They could as well invoke the Virgin Mary when they say yes to the doctor. Bruno -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On 08 May 2015, at 06:25, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 15:40, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 01:21:10PM +1200, LizR wrote: Another possibility - suppose we develop AIs, and they boostrap themselves into benig vastly cleverer than us - might they not design conscious experiences that have never been experienced before directly, as an art form, say? Brave new world started this trend with the feelies. The trend might go something like Books and recorded/invented experiences reenacted live (plays etc) - primitive VR (lose yourself in a good book) Recorded sound Recorded vision Sound and vision Recordings of experiences through the senses (tapping into nerve channels) Ditto including emotions Ditto including thoughts All of the above, created de novo by artists and/or computer programmes There is no problem if created by computer programs. After all, COMP is the assumption that this is possible. What is the problem is if these new thoughties pop into existence on their own without any process leading up to them. Only from the viewpoint of unlikelihood (about the same as the materialisation of a Boltzmann brain, I would imagine). But that doesn't make any difference to any philosophical implications! I agree. But it makes a huge difference for the math of the measure. Bruno however, yes, that was why I suggested an alternative mechanism that I think people may feel is more plausible. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
On 08 May 2015, at 03:30, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 07 May 2015, at 09:47, Bruce Kellett wrote If a non-physicist shows that they do not really understand the Standard Model of particle physics, or the Higgs mechanism, then I attempt to explain it to the in simple terms. Yes, but not on someone talking always like it was obvious that the Standard Model was ridiculous. In that case I would point to the remarkable success of the Standard Model in explaining a very wide range of physical results. If that is not sufficient to get a sceptic interested, then you might have a problem. But the point is, surely, that you have to convince those who come to the model with a sceptical cast of mind: you never achieve very much if you are always preaching to the choir. Sure. But when you explain something for years in a forum, you end up with those who skepticism looks more and more like dogmatic trolling or rhetorical hand waving. I am a scientist. It happens that I have some vocation for grand public, if and only if, by construction the argument is understandable by *all* universal machine (and all humans are). I am going away for a couple of days so will not be able to reply more fully in the short term. I will look your material over. However, a first glance suggests that you might be pitching at the wrong level. I am not preparing for an exam in computer science or logic (and I did do a course in symbolic logic, including up to Goedel's theorem, very many years ago). If I am asked to explain the Standard Model, I do not start with the theory of Lie groups. In that case you will make a poor explantion of the type easily demolished by handwaving. Comp is based on theoretical computer science. Some amount of it is needed to understand what is a computation. Or you have to take my authority into account. Why not? But your tone indicates that you have some prejudice, which are always hard to make people aware of. bruno Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On 8 May 2015 at 19:14, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 May 2015, at 02:35, Russell Standish wrote: This is why I draw the comparison with the Chinese room. If all the intelligence is encoded in a book, then intuition says that book cannot be conscious. This intuition is undoubtedly right for the sorts of books we're used to. But for a book that is much, much larger than the visible universe (which it would have to be to encode the intelligence needed to answer the questions in Chinese as a lookup table), then I think that intuition is very much doubtful. Consequently, the Chinese Room argument fails. This was Dan Dennett's point, IIRC. No, because the chinese room use only the program of the chinese man, not necessarily a giant look-up table. You don't need a huge look-up table (though I think that's how Searle implicitly described his set-up? ... it's been a long time since I last read The Mind's Eye) ... if you have a book that tells you how to simulate the Chinese man, then *that *book will also be huge, and normal intuition will fail. Similarly with the Einstein's Brain book in DRH's fable. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 8 May 2015 at 18:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 07 May 2015, at 14:45, Bruce Kellett wrote: We can use an original biological brain, or an equivalent digital replacement -- it does not make any significant difference to the argument. The first point is that in some conscious experience, be it a dream or anything else, there might be a portion of the 'brain' (in quotes because it can be biological or digital) that is not activated, so this can be removed without affecting the conscious experience. This idea of removing unused parts of brain so only active elements remain, seems problematic to me and not just because of counterfactual correctness. The ability to do this is implicit in the assumption that the physics of the brain is classical. But comp is based on the assumption that consciousness is the result of classical computation. If that assumption's wrong then comp fails, of course, from step 0 - no need to worry about the MGA. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 08 May 2015, at 06:28, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 15:25, PGC multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: On Friday, May 8, 2015 at 4:56:54 AM UTC+2, Liz R wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 14:04, Bruce Kellett bhke...@optusnet.com.au wrote: Which was rather my conclusion. Since the MGA is not a rigorous argument, it was always of very limited utility -- it certainly is insufficient to carry the weight of the conclusion that the physical substrate is unnecessary for consciousness. I suggested several conclusions. Do you think any of them potentially carry any weight? I don't see a single valid argument against the incompatibility between comp assumption and physical supervenience reached by MGA. Without more rigorous distinction between informal notion of recording and formal notion of Universal Number actualizing computation, or implications of Church's thesis bearing on this, such discourse will be the obvious result. But such a valid argument against incompatibility, therefore weakness or failure of the argument, is easy to miss with all the ideological hand waving purported to show some flaw, problem, or weakness when these mostly boil down to insisting that comp hypothesis is not true or that MGA is weak when slipping glitchy, informal and unspecified notions of recording and robust, implying their formality without backing it up, into the discussion. Not having time to even read all of it, I also think that Bruno spoon feeding everybody here and being lectured by Bruce on his teaching methodology is cheap; especially considering that Bruno offers his time and effort into answering for free, and out of good faith in informal scientific exchange. In short, I don't have time to read and therefore understand all of it, but with all the lowbrow moves, it seems redundant and beside the point. The truth or falsity of comp is not the issue here. If you can prove such formally, then go publish or show the goods here at least. PGC Zombie Ninja over and out. I have just been trying to list the objections people have made to the MGA (in another thread) and the conclusions people think they should draw from the MGA (in this thread) in the hope of reducing the fog of war a bit. But since Bruno pointed out that diplomats can cause wars, I haven't felt so happy about this sort of enterprise anyway, so maybe it's just as well everyone ignores me. It can be helpful. I expected something new with Bruce (on MGA), but it is the usual hand waving, by someone who ignores that arithmetic run the computations (which explains his incredulity). In 1987, when I present the argument, in the room some come up with similar idea, and I answered. But some told me after that when people come up with idea like a recording is conscious, or 2+2 might not be equal to 4, it means that I have win the argument for the audience, and should stop arguing, because what is proposed is absurd enough. MGA was already built to address cutting the air people, but for such people, there is no limit. It is like my student in math who suggest that may be what I prove to them is that 0=1, and reject classical logic. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
On 8 May 2015 at 16:10, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 7:28 AM, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 May 2015, at 04:19, Bruce Kellett wrote: Counterfactual correctness has not been shown to be necessary -- it is just an ad hoc move to save the argument. Counterfactual correctness is the bone of what *is* a computation. To have a computation, you need a universal system capable of understanding instruction of the type IF A THEN B, ELSE C. The local truth of the C act must be caused by the local falsity of the A predicate. The computation is in the semantic of those type of truth, at some level description of yourself. This is not necessary for computation. It would occur only in a program that required branching at some point if the input at that stage differed. Computation is perfectly possible without this requirement. If you have a simple linear program that computes an output for each input, then a recording of the action for any particular input, when replayed, would reconstruct that computation exactly. Counterfactual correctness is not required in such simple cases. And likewise, it is not required in more complicated situations, such as where there is a loop, say, that requires different actions on different iterations of the loop. The whole calculation, and hence its recording, follows all these iterations, and the recording reproduces them all exactly. If this program instantiates a conscious moment, or a whole conscious life, replaying the recording recreates that moment or life. Just as a recording of an orchestral symphony reproduces each bar of the symphony as well as the whole, following exactly the fact that each instrument plays different notes and sequences of notes in different contexts in the score. Conterfactual correctness is just a distraction. Recordings, absent interpretation, are devoid of meaning and don't exist for anyone (like the unheard tree fall). Absent interpretation any string of bits is meaningless because depending on how it is interpreted it could mean anything (see one time pad encryption). Consciousness requires both information and something to be informed, a recording on playback lacks an interpreter, and hence nothing is informed by it. Interpretation requires computation. A recording of a computation performs no interpretation. This reminds me of Putnam's a rock implements every finite state machine argument. According to some one time pad the rock implements any computation, but this is obviously useless as a computer, and no more interesting than saying that a block of marble contains every possible statue. But consider the case where the computation implemented is a self-contained virtual environment or an entity dreaming without inputs or outputs. This cannot be dismissed so easily as it is not dependent on an external interpretation. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
2015-05-08 8:39 GMT+02:00 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net: On 5/7/2015 11:24 PM, Jason Resch wrote: If the string of bits is all that is required for conscious, then the cable connected to the camera, or the optic nerve would be visually conscious. But I think those bits need to be interpreted, by the Mars Rover's software, or by the visual cortex, for there to be visual quaila. You know they have been so interpreted when the Rover maneuvers around the rock it saw. Yes, but that's the software that does the interpretation... we did write the software in a way that when it read such or such data, it means in its context, it's a rock. If there is no interpreter, no software, there is no meaning... But the software interprets what has context to it... that meaning is an internal notion, that does not preclude the absolute real realness outside the interpretation itself... Programs have only access to memory... For conscious program you should have stable inputs, so the memory locations where the program interact with an inferred external world, must be stable enough to look like an external world... that's enough to infer its existence and believe that from its POV it must be embedded in something bigger... platonia is bigger... way bigger than needed, that's why there should be a measure that explain the stability we see (again that's if and only if we are computational entities at the start... ie: if computationalism is true...) To be useful, there must be a tractable way (practical) that this measure could be extracted and compared to the world we experience... if not, even if conceptually it seems the best about consciousness and our real, it will stay as an in principle. The falsifiability must be able to be tested in practice... if not, I hardly see how one can say the theory is falsifiable. Quentin Brent The bits alone are not enough. Otherwise sqrt(2) or Pi might as well be theories of everything. Jason On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:19 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/7/2015 11:10 PM, Jason Resch wrote: Recordings, absent interpretation, are devoid of meaning and don't exist for anyone (like the unheard tree fall). Absent interpretation any string of bits is meaningless because depending on how it is interpreted it could mean anything (see one time pad encryption). Consciousness requires both information and something to be informed, Something to be informed is just a ghost in the machine. All that's required is that the information, the string of bits, refer to something, something that can be interacted with. This is easily seen in my favorite example of the AI Mars Rover. The string of bits represents There's a big rock in front of me because it leads to maneuvering around the rock. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. (Roy Batty/Rutger Hauer) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism!
Enthusiastically yes. Remove all subsidies but if we can fund engineering research. In the US, much of the subsidies go into the pockets of boards of directors rather than engineering progects, as with Solyndra, Then the money given is then split off and given back to the PACs of favored politicians. It's a mafia, Liz. And, no benefit to the public, no new tech ever gets to Market. -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Thu, May 7, 2015 10:53 pm Subject: Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism! On 8 May 2015 at 13:51, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Let's say I have no objection to anything technical done to remediate AGW except regulation aka serfdom. So you wouldn't be in favour of the government providing subsidies to help renewable or nuclear energy industries, or the removal of existing subsidies, regulations and the other support that currently exists from the fossil fuel industry? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 08 May 2015, at 10:31, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 18:24, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 May 2015, at 02:15, LizR wrote: Nicely summarised. I may have comments once I've had a chance to digest your summary (and any subsequent comments). In the meantime, if you aren't familiar with Maudlin's Olimpia argument that is also (possibly) relevant. It uses a similar form of argument to the MGA to arrive at a different consclusion, namely that supervenience of consciousness on a physical machine (brain, computer) isn't possible. But that is the same conclusion than MGA. Sorry, yes, I was too hasty here. I gave what I believe to be the differences between your and Madlin's conclusions in another post: 4. it shows that physical supervenience is impossible, and hence consciousness isn't the result of computation (Maudlin) 5. it shows that physical supervenience is impossible, and hence, if consciousness is the result of computation, it can't be supported by a physical machine (Bruno) Post in haste, regret at leisure. I often dash off a post in a short break when I should really be doing something else. No problem. Sometimes I sum up in saying that both MGA and OLYMPIA shows just the following things (With MECH = comp or digital Mechanism, and MAT = weak materialism (the doctrine asserting that some physical primitive things exists at the base level): MECH - NOT MAT MAT - NOT MECH or the more symmetrical: NOT MECH v NOT MAT I keep MECH, because it is my job. Maudlin suggests that the materialist might need to abandon computationalism, or modify it, but he is aware that is difficult and that it would look like adding magic. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism!
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:47 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: So all these hottest years on record we keep getting are made up? Just curious. Admittedly this is from 2010, maybe the trend has reversed in last 5 years? How long is the record? What is the p-value for the hypothesis of this being a trend and not a random fluctuation? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:39 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/7/2015 11:24 PM, Jason Resch wrote: If the string of bits is all that is required for conscious, then the cable connected to the camera, or the optic nerve would be visually conscious. But I think those bits need to be interpreted, by the Mars Rover's software, or by the visual cortex, for there to be visual quaila. You know they have been so interpreted when the Rover maneuvers around the rock it saw. I don't think we are arguing about anything, just talking past each other. Jason Brent The bits alone are not enough. Otherwise sqrt(2) or Pi might as well be theories of everything. Jason On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:19 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/7/2015 11:10 PM, Jason Resch wrote: Recordings, absent interpretation, are devoid of meaning and don't exist for anyone (like the unheard tree fall). Absent interpretation any string of bits is meaningless because depending on how it is interpreted it could mean anything (see one time pad encryption). Consciousness requires both information and something to be informed, Something to be informed is just a ghost in the machine. All that's required is that the information, the string of bits, refer to something, something that can be interacted with. This is easily seen in my favorite example of the AI Mars Rover. The string of bits represents There's a big rock in front of me because it leads to maneuvering around the rock. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 08 May 2015, at 10:33, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 18:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 07 May 2015, at 14:45, Bruce Kellett wrote: We can use an original biological brain, or an equivalent digital replacement -- it does not make any significant difference to the argument. The first point is that in some conscious experience, be it a dream or anything else, there might be a portion of the 'brain' (in quotes because it can be biological or digital) that is not activated, so this can be removed without affecting the conscious experience. This idea of removing unused parts of brain so only active elements remain, seems problematic to me and not just because of counterfactual correctness. The ability to do this is implicit in the assumption that the physics of the brain is classical. But comp is based on the assumption that consciousness is the result of classical computation. Yes, with classical taken from the classical Church Turing Post thesis. In that sense, quantum computation is still seen as classical, and in particular we know that the UD, or the sigma_1 arithmetic emulates all rational approximation of the quantum computations too. But we have to justify what it is so from the classical. From a paper by Selesnick and Rawling (+ Golblatt), it is almost just tedious exercise to see if X1* can, or not emulate a quantum computer, or at least a quantum bit NOR operation. With comp, the observable are a modalities, a mode of the way to look at things. In particular, we use when we want to predict, or make bet, and this is done by conjuncting t to []A so as to guarantie the existence of a reality. The conjunction with p is stronger, as it is quasi an asumption of absolute truth By incompleteness, those nuances change the logic, without changing the truth with which the machine compose in arithmetic. If that assumption's wrong then comp fails, of course, from step 0 - no need to worry about the MGA. UDA would work even if the generalized brain is a quantum computer, and that the entanglement with the first particles plays a role. The UD generates all those states, and in the limit the quantum computations might win the limit. The quantization which are given by the logic of []p t with p sigma_1 suggest that the quantum might be the most stable thing in the environment of the average conscious universal (Löbian) machine (and other Löbian entities). Physicist should not worry. If physics becomes a theorem of machine theology, physics will be based on a more solid ground than the usual extrapolation from what we see or dream. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism!
Here's my counter argument to this. If solar really worked, nations with more need for less or no fossil fuels would have implemented clean tech already. Sweden, Japan, Israel, Switzerland, etc, would say screw you to oil, and coal, no matter how much the US is owned by Big Petro. So we need basic research, for ourselves for the environment, for the economy on solar storage. Regulations tend to benefit the regulators and hardly ever, Joe Six Pack. See, we are now restricting your hours on the road to reduce damage to the environment, and forestall catastrophic climate change and save your poor unwashed, asses. This will be coming next. But this is the mentality. First lying, then exaggeration, then re-naming, then excuses. -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Fri, May 8, 2015 12:33 am Subject: Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism! On 8 May 2015 at 15:14, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Better yet, assume some of its true, and move to solar. The only way to move to solar is to create superb storage technology, for night and winter times. Otherwise solar fails. Any demands for regulation of the serfs for their own good, needs to be met with rebellion, because it then is not a fix, but an excuse to impose dictatorship. Solar electric nearly eliminates co2, methane, soot, and thermal release, so therefore, regulations are never needed. The problem - or one of the problems - is that existing govts and corps have got a lot invested in fossil. Hence we may need regulations - or even just the removal of existing regulations - to level the playing field and give solar a chance. Hopefully it will take off anyway, but time may be critical, si as with RAW's ten good reasons to get up in the morning it may be a case of any little thing tippnig the balance. Including govt regulations making things better for investors in solar (say). I'd hate to see the human race go down the tuebs because of ideological oppostition to any form of regulations, should that happen to be the deciding factor. PS I see Elon Musk has some sort of storage thingy in the works, did that already get an airing here? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
On 08 May 2015, at 10:00, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2015-05-08 8:39 GMT+02:00 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net: On 5/7/2015 11:24 PM, Jason Resch wrote: If the string of bits is all that is required for conscious, then the cable connected to the camera, or the optic nerve would be visually conscious. But I think those bits need to be interpreted, by the Mars Rover's software, or by the visual cortex, for there to be visual quaila. You know they have been so interpreted when the Rover maneuvers around the rock it saw. Yes, but that's the software that does the interpretation... we did write the software in a way that when it read such or such data, it means in its context, it's a rock. If there is no interpreter, no software, there is no meaning... But the software interprets what has context to it... that meaning is an internal notion, that does not preclude the absolute real realness outside the interpretation itself... Programs have only access to memory... For conscious program you should have stable inputs, so the memory locations where the program interact with an inferred external world, must be stable enough to look like an external world... that's enough to infer its existence and believe that from its POV it must be embedded in something bigger... platonia is bigger... way bigger than needed, that's why there should be a measure that explain the stability we see (again that's if and only if we are computational entities at the start... ie: if computationalism is true...) To be useful, there must be a tractable way (practical) that this measure could be extracted and compared to the world we experience... if not, even if conceptually it seems the best about consciousness and our real, it will stay as an in principle. The falsifiability must be able to be tested in practice... if not, I hardly see how one can say the theory is falsifiable. If we limit the belief of the machine to the provable arithmetical sentences, we can extract already the logic of the measure one, which is a step to the full measure. This is literally forced to us (and to the machine) by the constrained of self-referential correctness, which provides different logic for rational belief ([]A); knowledge (rational true belief: []A A), prediction/measurable/observable []p t, (pr sigma_1 for the computationalist machine), which indeed gives the quantization giving sense to the enterprise. This is made possible thanks to special relations existing between sigma_1 truth sigma_1 proof and computations, some provable, some true but not provable, relatively to each sound machines. Bruno Quentin Brent The bits alone are not enough. Otherwise sqrt(2) or Pi might as well be theories of everything. Jason On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:19 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/7/2015 11:10 PM, Jason Resch wrote: Recordings, absent interpretation, are devoid of meaning and don't exist for anyone (like the unheard tree fall). Absent interpretation any string of bits is meaningless because depending on how it is interpreted it could mean anything (see one time pad encryption). Consciousness requires both information and something to be informed, Something to be informed is just a ghost in the machine. All that's required is that the information, the string of bits, refer to something, something that can be interacted with. This is easily seen in my favorite example of the AI Mars Rover. The string of bits represents There's a big rock in front of me because it leads to maneuvering around the rock. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- All those moments will be lost
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On Thu, May 7, 2015 Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: In the case of chaotic systems (or Og for that matter), a hypothetical Laplace daemon could simulate the system using exact initial conditions Even if we ignore Quantum Mechanics that would still be untrue because today we know something that Laplace did not: even very small changes in initial conditions can increase the number of calculations required to make a prediction enormously, it will increase them to infinity if space or time is continuous. And today we know that even in theory it takes time and energy to make a calculation, and the faster you make it the more energy you need. If you calculate too slowly the event you're trying to predict will have already happened before you finish, and if you calculate too quickly you produce so much waste heat you'll alter the system you're trying to predict. and tell you what will be experienced next. And even if we ignore the above objection the daemon might know what we will do next but the daemon couldn't tell us because then the daemon's own behavior would alter the prediction; I might be of a argumentative frame of mind and be determined to do the exact opposite of whatever the daemon said I was going to do. In that case to figure out what I would do a mega-daemon would be required to figure out what the daemon was going to predict. Obviously before long we'd need a mega-mega-daemon and so on. With FPI, Laplace's daemon cannot do that. Not even an infinite string of mega, mega-mega, mega-mega-mega. daemons can answer gibberish questions. the third person answer will always be probabilistic. What I see in the first person not probabalistic. In physics everything is probabilistic and we live in a world governed by the laws of physics. It is definite, and I only need to wait around to find out. And Turing tells us that for some things, like figuring out if a program will stop, you'll have to wait around for a infinite, and not just astronomically large, number of years and even then you still won't find out if it stops or not. nobody knows how to make a Turing Machine or a computer or how to make one single calculation without using matter that operates according to the laws of physics. Maybe there is some other way to do it but if there is nobody knows what it is. IMHO, one can never know what it is made out of. That is equivalent to saying the blunders in Bruno's proof can never be repaired. Hardly - that is the result at step 7, nothing to do with your so-called blunders. IMHO, one can go there directly in one step, as it is a pretty obvious conclusion from the CT thesis. Pretty obvious? I agree that any finite program that terminates can be calculated on a Turing Machine, but there is in general no way to know if any given program will terminate or not, and nobody has the slightest idea how to make a Turing Machine, or even anything close to it, without using matter that obeys the laws of physics. If I am a computation, I cannot tell whether I'm running on a PC or a Mac I remind you that both the Mac and the PC are made of matter that obeys the laws of physics. the precise properties of the ontological material reality (Bruno primitive reality) are not accessible to us I don't need to know what the ultimate primitive reality is (assuming such a thing even exists), I just need to know the relative primitivity of physics and mathematics. Unless Bruno can show that mathematics is more primitive than matter and has found a way to make a calculation that doesn't involve physics his proof is just an exercise in circularity. Bruno, on the other hand has TOEs for sale. As of today nobody's TOE is worth a bucket of warm spit, none of them work worth a damn. Pick one, any one, they'll all do your computations for you. No you pick one and then use it to calculate 2+2 for me without using matter or any of the laws of physics. we know that Bruno's Platonic integers have never been shown to be able to calculate anything, we have zero evidence they can do anything without physics, but we have an astronomical amount of evidence that matter operating according to the laws of physics can make calculations. I gather arithmetic has been proven capable of universal computation Nonsense. As of today if the laws of physics are not involved nobody has ever been able to calculate ANYTHING. That's why people still make computer hardware. I still don't get it, even today one computer can run 2 separate programs simultaneously, so what's your point? But it can't simultaneous experience being two different persons. Why not? it is important to delve into what supervenience_actually_ means You're the one who keeps using it so you tell me what supervenience _actually_ means. Conscious experience then and there supervenes on the recording just as much as the original computation I think
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On 5/8/2015 12:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 07 May 2015, at 00:26, meekerdb wrote: On 5/6/2015 10:32 AM, John Clark wrote: You said the dovetailer leads to an irreduciable indeterminism, but if the machine is finite then a faster but still finite computer could predict what the dovetailer will do; it still could not of course predict what you will see nex Even worse it cannot predict even the probabilities that a given states of consciousness (or the universe as a whole) is followed by some other state, because the UD would have to reach a point from which it would not revisit the given state again and change the statistics of the successor states. But this is never the case for the non-terminating programs. Every state may be visited infinitely many times as the UD runs and so the statistics are always subject to change. Not at all. By the first person invariance for the delays, the statistics are defined at the limit. But that sounds like another instance of reversing the argument: There must be stable statistics in the limit because my theory is true and if there weren't stable statistics it wouldn't work. Brent Of course one may say there must be a class of states that are statistically stable and there must be a finite measure for them - but only if the theory is true. Which is the point. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 5/8/2015 1:33 AM, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 18:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 07 May 2015, at 14:45, Bruce Kellett wrote: We can use an original biological brain, or an equivalent digital replacement -- it does not make any significant difference to the argument. The first point is that in some conscious experience, be it a dream or anything else, there might be a portion of the 'brain' (in quotes because it can be biological or digital) that is not activated, so this can be removed without affecting the conscious experience. This idea of removing unused parts of brain so only active elements remain, seems problematic to me and not just because of counterfactual correctness. The ability to do this is implicit in the assumption that the physics of the brain is classical. But comp is based on the assumption that consciousness is the result of classical computation. If that assumption's wrong then comp fails, of course, from step 0 - no need to worry about the MGA. Bruno points out that a classical computer can compute anything that a quantum computer can so it doesn't exactly fail; what I think it implies that the classical computation must include the environemnt, i.e. all the extra physical degrees of freedom and entanglement that make the brain computation (approximately) classical. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
On 5/8/2015 12:12 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 16:10, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 7:28 AM, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 May 2015, at 04:19, Bruce Kellett wrote: Counterfactual correctness has not been shown to be necessary -- it is just an ad hoc move to save the argument. Counterfactual correctness is the bone of what *is* a computation. To have a computation, you need a universal system capable of understanding instruction of the type IF A THEN B, ELSE C. The local truth of the C act must be caused by the local falsity of the A predicate. The computation is in the semantic of those type of truth, at some level description of yourself. This is not necessary for computation. It would occur only in a program that required branching at some point if the input at that stage differed. Computation is perfectly possible without this requirement. If you have a simple linear program that computes an output for each input, then a recording of the action for any particular input, when replayed, would reconstruct that computation exactly. Counterfactual correctness is not required in such simple cases. And likewise, it is not required in more complicated situations, such as where there is a loop, say, that requires different actions on different iterations of the loop. The whole calculation, and hence its recording, follows all these iterations, and the recording reproduces them all exactly. If this program instantiates a conscious moment, or a whole conscious life, replaying the recording recreates that moment or life. Just as a recording of an orchestral symphony reproduces each bar of the symphony as well as the whole, following exactly the fact that each instrument plays different notes and sequences of notes in different contexts in the score. Conterfactual correctness is just a distraction. Recordings, absent interpretation, are devoid of meaning and don't exist for anyone (like the unheard tree fall). Absent interpretation any string of bits is meaningless because depending on how it is interpreted it could mean anything (see one time pad encryption). Consciousness requires both information and something to be informed, a recording on playback lacks an interpreter, and hence nothing is informed by it. Interpretation requires computation. A recording of a computation performs no interpretation. This reminds me of Putnam's a rock implements every finite state machine argument. According to some one time pad the rock implements any computation, but this is obviously useless as a computer, and no more interesting than saying that a block of marble contains every possible statue. But consider the case where the computation implemented is a self-contained virtual environment or an entity dreaming without inputs or outputs. This cannot be dismissed so easily as it is not dependent on an external interpretation. It has a conscious part and an environment part; so it doesn't avoid the requirement that the consciousness be conscious of something external. Bruno's theory is essentially of this form: arithmetic is the environment and the consciousness of one part of the environment by another. And we don't have the one time pad to decrypt it. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Meat trial
Neat! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 5/8/2015 3:24 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:47:22AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is only a new recent fashion on this list to take seriously that a recording can be conscious, because for a logician, that error is the (common) confusion between the finger and the moon, or between 2+2=4 and 2+2=4. It is only recently that we began seriously discussing the MGA at all (about the last 3 years). Why do you say conscious recording (playbacks) are the same as the confusion between 2+2=4 and 2+2=4? One thing is that that there can be many different instances of 2+2=4 but only one 2+2=4. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 9 May 2015 at 10:48, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Sat, May 09, 2015 at 09:58:47AM +1200, LizR wrote: Plus, assuming no quantum entanglement with the environment is involved in consciousness (as seems likely given the decoherence times of neurons etc) I would have thought that the connection between consciousness and the environment is entirely one of entanglement. If the environment is in a state like Σ aᵢ|ψᵢ and the observer is in a state Σ bᵢ|φᵢ where an observed property φᵢ corresponds to a physical state of the environment ψᵢ, then the combined environment + observer state is Σ aᵢbᵢ |ψᵢ ⊗ |φᵢ But this is just an entangled state between two systems. It just doesn't seem like it because we're only aware of a single |ψᵢ ⊗ |φᵢ. That's too advanced for me. Can you explain how this works in terms of the (assumed to be) physical things involved, like nerve impulses? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 9 May 2015 at 11:24, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/8/2015 2:58 PM, LizR wrote: On 9 May 2015 at 09:02, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/8/2015 1:33 AM, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 18:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 07 May 2015, at 14:45, Bruce Kellett wrote: We can use an original biological brain, or an equivalent digital replacement -- it does not make any significant difference to the argument. The first point is that in some conscious experience, be it a dream or anything else, there might be a portion of the 'brain' (in quotes because it can be biological or digital) that is not activated, so this can be removed without affecting the conscious experience. This idea of removing unused parts of brain so only active elements remain, seems problematic to me and not just because of counterfactual correctness. The ability to do this is implicit in the assumption that the physics of the brain is classical. But comp is based on the assumption that consciousness is the result of classical computation. If that assumption's wrong then comp fails, of course, from step 0 - no need to worry about the MGA. Bruno points out that a classical computer can compute anything that a quantum computer can so it doesn't exactly fail; what I think it implies that the classical computation must include the environemnt, i.e. all the extra physical degrees of freedom and entanglement that make the brain computation (approximately) classical. That sounds like putting the cart before the horse. The question is, can the brain and environment be extracted from the assumption that consciousness is classical computation? Which is, of course, still an open question. True, it's a problem from either end. If you just assume computation is fundamental then you have to get QM out of it and ALSO the approximate classicality of the physically realized computation. Exactly. That is Bruno's problem. Plus, assuming no quantum entanglement with the environment is involved in consciousness (as seems likely given the decoherence times of neurons etc) That's not taking the QM seriously. QM says that it's the decoherence due to entanglement with the environment that produces the classical behavior. OK, I think even with a little brain I'm beginning to see the point here. I'm not yet sure if it's relevant, however. I think Max Tegmark's point was that the environment of a neuron is other neurons (and the surrounding material - glia, blood, etc) and that everything in a brain is decohering far faster than than the timescales of consciousness. Why would taking the QM seriously prevent the brain behaving as a classical computer on those timescales? Or to move the question into a (perhaps) better known realm, why would it stop a computer running an AI programme behaving as a classical computer? If the brain is fundamentally different to an AI due to quantum effects, that invalidates comp at step 0 (and possibly invalidates strong AI as well). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 9 May 2015 at 11:28, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/8/2015 3:24 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:47:22AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is only a new recent fashion on this list to take seriously that a recording can be conscious, because for a logician, that error is the (common) confusion between the finger and the moon, or between 2+2=4 and 2+2=4. It is only recently that we began seriously discussing the MGA at all (about the last 3 years). Why do you say conscious recording (playbacks) are the same as the confusion between 2+2=4 and 2+2=4? One thing is that that there can be many different instances of 2+2=4 but only one 2+2=4. It's map and territory, like the finger and the Moon. The finger points to the Moon to indicate it, but isn't itself the Moon. Likewise with 2+2=4 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 9 May 2015 at 13:07, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 09:02:29AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: In 1987, when I present the argument, in the room some come up with similar idea, and I answered. But some told me after that when people come up with idea like a recording is conscious, or 2+2 might Really? Why are people so quick to accept that conscious recordings are absurd? Sure I can understand that Bogie in the screen version of Casablanca is not conscious, but that is not the sort of recording we're talking about. Here we're talking about something like an EEG pattern where every neuron is recorded, as well as the entire connectome. Why is it any more absurd for that to be be conscious than it is for the original lump of grey goo to be conscious? I suspect that saying a recording is conscious is seen as a form of eliminativism - the thinking is something like, if a recording can be conscious, then consciousness can't actually exist. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
On 01-05-2015 17:59, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 30 Apr 2015, at 17:07, smitra wrote:
On 30-04-2015 09:19, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 30 April 2015 at 13:20, Bruce Kellett
bhkell...@optusnet.com.au wrote:
The way I understand it, nothing happens in Platonia. Which is to
say
nothing ever happens. The real question is why we think stuff is
'happening'. Well, OK - the hallucination that stuff is happening
is what is
happening.
So explain the hallucination. Why does that 'happen'. Note that
'happen' is
a temporal term.
I have the feeling that I have been alive for years, but I would
still
have this feeling if I had only been alive for seconds. There does
not
have to be a physical, causal connection between the observer
moments
of my life for them to form a subjective temporal sequence. The
sequence is implied by their content.
The brain in the vat is always possible. We cannot rule out
solipsism either.
Julian Barbour, in his book 'The End of Time' tried to abolish time
altogether because of the difficulties of defining time in general
relativity. He replaced time as a parameter with the notion of 'time
capsules' present in every point of phase space.
It is not really clear whether this idea was successful or not. It
has
not attracted a great following.
But if any such idea is to make sense, the observer moments do have
to
be connected by quite strong causal laws so that the sequence of
moments tells a coherent story. Or else each moment tells a
different
story, and we are back with 'Last Tuesdayism' or solipsism.
I don't think Fred Hoyle's account works either. It feels like a
'many
minds' collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Bruce
You can use the formalism developed in this article:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.1615
If we take finite time steps corresponding to a computational step,
then an observer momement is defined by specifying some operator:
sum over {in} of| j1,j2j3,...jni1,i2,i3...in|
where the jk are functions of the i1,...,in.
This then simplify specifies that a computation proceeds from an
initial state defined by the sequence of numbers i1,i2 etc. to the
next step defined by the numbers j1,j2 etc.
The summation has some finite range, so the algorithm is not defined
precisely. On the other hand, the fact that the summand contains more
than just a single term means that the state of the system is not
well defined. The more terms there are in the summation, the better
defined the computation becomes, but the state of the system becomes
less well defined.
A computation that is complex enough to represent what the brain is
capable of will contain an astronomically large number of terms;
whatever consciousness is and how it works, from experience we know
that what we feel and think doesn't contain enough information to
nail down exactly what the brain is doing.
This means that in a MWI picture, it is wrong to represent the
branches as single lines, they are bundles consisting of an
astronomically large number of lines, the correlation contained in
them contain a vast amount of information, more than what you need to
define what computation is actually being performed at any instant.
Anyway, I think that Bruno should consider deriving physics from
starting with defining observer moments as matrix elements O = sum
over i of |ji| and then physics should be derived by introducing
more degrees of freedom and then finding a generator of O. So, you
invent a universe described by a Hamiltonian so that running the
laws of physics starting from some initial conditions will allow you
to properly represent O.
Then one considers that particular representation that requires the
least amount of information given some O. Then one should consider
also minimizing that information over the possible ways of defining O
(note that O being defined by a summation indicates that O itself
doesn't know what state it is in).
That seems interesting, but is there not still treachery here, copying
of physics? How will we take into account the G G* distinction? I
have first to justisfy such O from the material hypostases. But the
shadow of what you say is already there: I mean the ket-bra IijI.
Of course, any intermediate work will help!
Putting aside the precise details, what I think is a common mistake is
to assume that we're dealing with precisely defined computational
states. As the MGA shows, that leads to problems. But there is no need
to make that assumption, one can also assume that you need to consider a
set of such states, each element of which is mapped to elements of
another set. That way you have both a notion of the computational state
and the algorithm that is being run, albeit that both are imprecisely
defined. But in the context of complex systems that would need to be
specified using a huge amount of information, like our brain, they can
both be quite well
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 07:47:42AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is because it does not, indeed, and because of the insanity you need to believe that a movie of a computation is a computation, that Replaying the movie is a computation, so saying this idea is insane doesn't help. The question at hand is whether replaying the movie is sufficient to instantiate the consciousness moment. Given that the conscious moment already existed at some time in the past, we have to define the physicalist supervenience thesis as supervenience on the here and now, as opposed to the original then and there, in order to drive a possible difference between the computational supervenience thesis (which doesn't say whether the recording is conscious or not) and the phsyicalist one which says it is. I'm not convinced that this version of the physicalist supervenience thesis makes a lot of sense, and I would say that neither Bruce nor John Clark promote this when they say that replaying the recording make not one iota of difference to the actual experience. Perhaps there is another way of skinning the cat. Suppose we have our original computed experience, and the recording made of it. Now let us prepare an ensemble of recordings that vary a little bit from the original. Presumably, if we can arrange the encoding of the recording in a non-fragile manner (fragility of an instruction set refers to how often random mutations of a program lead to non-valid programs - a non-fragile instruction is one where random mutations usually lead to working programs. The genetic code is not very fragile, due to vast amounts of redundancy, but artificial computers are typically very fragile). The point here being that it might well be possible to create a recording of a new conscious experience (albeit very similar to the previously recorded experience), without needing an astronomical amount of monkeys clicking away on keyboards. If this is at all plausible, then we can do away with the troublesome here and now aspect of the physicalist supervenience thesis. This still leaves us with whether this new recording actually instantiates the new conscious experience in our non-robust universe. The Physicalist supervenience thesis quite unambiguously says yes. Computationalism is simply mute on the affair, as the new recording is definitely not the same program as the one that instantiate the consciousness. If we are to accept that instantiating the conscious experience by replaying the recording is an absurd notion, then it is clear there is a difference between this PPST and Comp. But I raise the question of whether it really is absurd? The difference between the playback of the recording and the actual computation is one of counterfactual correctness. If it is absurd, it can only be absurd because counterfactual correctness is an important feature. But too many people have stated that it is irrelevant... If this counterfactual aspect is important, then the only way to rescue physical supervenience (as opposed to physicalist supervenience aka primitive physical supervenience) and comp is to require that the counterfactuals must physically real as well. This in turn entails some sort of many worlds must be true, and this is back in the robust ontology territory. But to really draw that conclusion requires accepting the absurdity of noncounterfactual program instantiating consciousness. I think more work is actually needed here, as we're talking about very large recordings, something like 1e14 bits per second of consciousness (about 100 Terabytes per second). Replaying this movie in real time is still many orders of magnitude out from current capability. Normal HD movies is only about 500KB per second. I don't have a stake in the outcome either way - I accept the MWI as the preferred interpretation of QM, where the MGA neither works, nor is needed, as ontology is robust. I'm just trying the critique the argument on its own terms. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 9 May 2015 at 10:37, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:33:43PM +1200, LizR wrote: But comp is based on the assumption that consciousness is the result of classical computation. If that assumption's wrong then comp fails, of course, from step 0 - no need to worry about the MGA. But Brent's qualms are just that removing the inactive parts (thus making the computation noncounterfactual, and potentially destroying the comp supervenience) also actually change the physical quantum state, so may also be destroying the physical supervenience. But comp assumes classical computation... Hence invalidating the distinction between computational and physical supervenience. If the computation isn't classical, and can't be made classical, then comp fails at step 0 ISTM, the MGA works in a purely classical physical reality (such as the non-robust case), but not a quantum one (which is a robust case). This is not a problem for Bruno's argument, but it must be clear that the MGA is _only_ relevant for the non-robust case. It's relevant for a robust classical case, which is presumably what is supposed to take place (or exist timelessly) in Platonia. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:47:22AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is only a new recent fashion on this list to take seriously that a recording can be conscious, because for a logician, that error is the (common) confusion between the finger and the moon, or between 2+2=4 and 2+2=4. It is only recently that we began seriously discussing the MGA at all (about the last 3 years). Why do you say conscious recording (playbacks) are the same as the confusion between 2+2=4 and 2+2=4? I don't even know what you mean by confusion between the finger and the moon... Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:33:43PM +1200, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 18:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 07 May 2015, at 14:45, Bruce Kellett wrote: We can use an original biological brain, or an equivalent digital replacement -- it does not make any significant difference to the argument. The first point is that in some conscious experience, be it a dream or anything else, there might be a portion of the 'brain' (in quotes because it can be biological or digital) that is not activated, so this can be removed without affecting the conscious experience. This idea of removing unused parts of brain so only active elements remain, seems problematic to me and not just because of counterfactual correctness. The ability to do this is implicit in the assumption that the physics of the brain is classical. But comp is based on the assumption that consciousness is the result of classical computation. If that assumption's wrong then comp fails, of course, from step 0 - no need to worry about the MGA. But Brent's qualms are just that removing the inactive parts (thus making the computation noncounterfactual, and potentially destroying the comp supervenience) also actually change the physical quantum state, so may also be destroying the physical supervenience. Hence invalidating the distinction between computational and physical supervenience. ISTM, the MGA works in a purely classical physical reality (such as the non-robust case), but not a quantum one (which is a robust case). This is not a problem for Bruno's argument, but it must be clear that the MGA is _only_ relevant for the non-robust case. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 9 May 2015 at 09:02, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/8/2015 1:33 AM, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 18:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 07 May 2015, at 14:45, Bruce Kellett wrote: We can use an original biological brain, or an equivalent digital replacement -- it does not make any significant difference to the argument. The first point is that in some conscious experience, be it a dream or anything else, there might be a portion of the 'brain' (in quotes because it can be biological or digital) that is not activated, so this can be removed without affecting the conscious experience. This idea of removing unused parts of brain so only active elements remain, seems problematic to me and not just because of counterfactual correctness. The ability to do this is implicit in the assumption that the physics of the brain is classical. But comp is based on the assumption that consciousness is the result of classical computation. If that assumption's wrong then comp fails, of course, from step 0 - no need to worry about the MGA. Bruno points out that a classical computer can compute anything that a quantum computer can so it doesn't exactly fail; what I think it implies that the classical computation must include the environemnt, i.e. all the extra physical degrees of freedom and entanglement that make the brain computation (approximately) classical. That sounds like putting the cart before the horse. The question is, can the brain and environment be extracted from the assumption that consciousness is classical computation? Which is, of course, still an open question. Plus, assuming no quantum entanglement with the environment is involved in consciousness (as seems likely given the decoherence times of neurons etc) the brain could in theory be isolated at the point where the external stimuli are converted to nerve impulses - we don't interact with the environment directly. It's very dark and quiet in our bone caves, with shadowy messages coming and going that we believe indicate the existence of an outside world... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Sat, May 09, 2015 at 09:58:47AM +1200, LizR wrote: Plus, assuming no quantum entanglement with the environment is involved in consciousness (as seems likely given the decoherence times of neurons etc) I would have thought that the connection between consciousness and the environment is entirely one of entanglement. If the environment is in a state like Σ aᵢ|ψᵢ and the observer is in a state Σ bᵢ|φᵢ where an observed property φᵢ corresponds to a physical state of the environment ψᵢ, then the combined environment + observer state is Σ aᵢbᵢ |ψᵢ ⊗ |φᵢ But this is just an entangled state between two systems. It just doesn't seem like it because we're only aware of a single |ψᵢ ⊗ |φᵢ. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 5/8/2015 3:48 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Sat, May 09, 2015 at 09:58:47AM +1200, LizR wrote: Plus, assuming no quantum entanglement with the environment is involved in consciousness (as seems likely given the decoherence times of neurons etc) I would have thought that the connection between consciousness and the environment is entirely one of entanglement. If the environment is in a state like Σ aᵢ|ψᵢ and the observer is in a state Σ bᵢ|φᵢ where an observed property φᵢ corresponds to a physical state of the environment ψᵢ, then the combined environment + observer state is Σ aᵢbᵢ |ψᵢ ⊗ |φᵢ But this is just an entangled state between two systems. It just doesn't seem like it because we're only aware of a single |ψᵢ ⊗ |φᵢ. JKC will demand to know who we are? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 5/8/2015 2:58 PM, LizR wrote: On 9 May 2015 at 09:02, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/8/2015 1:33 AM, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 18:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 07 May 2015, at 14:45, Bruce Kellett wrote: We can use an original biological brain, or an equivalent digital replacement -- it does not make any significant difference to the argument. The first point is that in some conscious experience, be it a dream or anything else, there might be a portion of the 'brain' (in quotes because it can be biological or digital) that is not activated, so this can be removed without affecting the conscious experience. This idea of removing unused parts of brain so only active elements remain, seems problematic to me and not just because of counterfactual correctness. The ability to do this is implicit in the assumption that the physics of the brain is classical. But comp is based on the assumption that consciousness is the result of classical computation. If that assumption's wrong then comp fails, of course, from step 0 - no need to worry about the MGA. Bruno points out that a classical computer can compute anything that a quantum computer can so it doesn't exactly fail; what I think it implies that the classical computation must include the environemnt, i.e. all the extra physical degrees of freedom and entanglement that make the brain computation (approximately) classical. That sounds like putting the cart before the horse. The question is, can the brain and environment be extracted from the assumption that consciousness is classical computation? Which is, of course, still an open question. True, it's a problem from either end. If you just assume computation is fundamental then you have to get QM out of it and ALSO the approximate classicality of the physically realized computation. Plus, assuming no quantum entanglement with the environment is involved in consciousness (as seems likely given the decoherence times of neurons etc) That's not taking the QM seriously. QM says that it's the decoherence due to entanglement with the environment that produces the classical behavior. Brent the brain could in theory be isolated at the point where the external stimuli are converted to nerve impulses - we don't interact with the environment directly. It's very dark and quiet in our bone caves, with shadowy messages coming and going that we believe indicate the existence of an outside world... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On the subject of modifying the recording, let's say we recorded the states of all the brain cells and so on. This would mean that the signals coming in from the senses were encoded in the recording. If we assume the experience was of looking at a red dot, it might be fairly easy to replace the red dot nerve signals with green dot ones. But then you have to change the memories to be of the relevant colour, and any thoughts to reflect that fact... And this is from looking at a dot. Hmm. On 9 May 2015 at 14:59, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 May 2015 at 10:37, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:33:43PM +1200, LizR wrote: But comp is based on the assumption that consciousness is the result of classical computation. If that assumption's wrong then comp fails, of course, from step 0 - no need to worry about the MGA. But Brent's qualms are just that removing the inactive parts (thus making the computation noncounterfactual, and potentially destroying the comp supervenience) also actually change the physical quantum state, so may also be destroying the physical supervenience. But comp assumes classical computation... Hence invalidating the distinction between computational and physical supervenience. If the computation isn't classical, and can't be made classical, then comp fails at step 0 ISTM, the MGA works in a purely classical physical reality (such as the non-robust case), but not a quantum one (which is a robust case). This is not a problem for Bruno's argument, but it must be clear that the MGA is _only_ relevant for the non-robust case. It's relevant for a robust classical case, which is presumably what is supposed to take place (or exist timelessly) in Platonia. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 9 May 2015 at 14:58, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: But to really draw that conclusion requires accepting the absurdity of noncounterfactual program instantiating consciousness. I think more work is actually needed here, as we're talking about very large recordings, something like 1e14 bits per second of consciousness (about 100 Terabytes per second). Replaying this movie in real time is still many orders of magnitude out from current capability. Normal HD movies is only about 500KB per second. However, there is no obvious need to replay the recording in real time. But given those figures we'd certainly want to approach real time, because at the given rate a second of consciousness would require something like 10 years to play back. I don't have a stake in the outcome either way - I accept the MWI as the preferred interpretation of QM, where the MGA neither works, nor is needed, as ontology is robust. I'm just trying the critique the argument on its own terms. What does your comment about the MWI mean here? At first sight it appears to be assuming the result - if comp is true then the MWI has to be recovered from the UD (I think). But I could easily be missing the point. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
RE: The dovetailer disassembled
Hi John (Mikes), If it helps I went into academia and got 'Doctored' specifically so I had some way to get listened to by science ... That might actually have an impact. I am now out... But have ties. I am taking the alternate route: The detestable soul-sucking devil called commerce. I build it and will explain it later. Your 'hanging in there' is appreciated. Cheers Colin -Original Message- From: John Mikes jami...@gmail.com Sent: 7/05/2015 7:03 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: The dovetailer disassembled Colin: some 15-20 years ago I read your texts - even made some tenets part of my worldview text. Now I had difficulty to force myself reading along your post. Maybe I got older, maybe your style became more sophisticated. Both? I still struggle with the 'jargon' of this (and other) lists and took umbrage by developing into my agnostic views: there are lots of items 'out there' we so far did not take information from, yet those items (factors?) influence changes we experience in here on our better known(?) unknowables. I lost you when you deepend your connection to the establishment-science to get the degree. I may call it adjustment, not necessarily a cave-in. I still hold you in high esteem. Thanks for your post, I did not give up yet. John Mikes On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 11:11 PM, Colin Hales col.ha...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 11:21 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: It also appears to me that the computing entity would not be conscious for the same reason computed flight physics is not flight. I don't have the benefit of thinking about this for ten years, but it does seem that there is a map/territory confusion here. Comp* is the idea that a computer programme could be conscious. Simulated flight isn't real flight, but (according to comp) consciousness can't be simulated, because it's already the result of computations. *or comp1 if you prefer With respect I will refuse to buy into the jargon of this milieu. I don't care what comp-x or any other variant of it is. I care even less what a dovetailer is. Yet you have touched right on the very essence of the map/territory confusion. But it is even worse than you think. First consider A) The universe is a massive collection of interacting elemental primitives of kind X whose interactions could be characterised as a computation. Call it a noumenon. Underlying fabric of whatever it is we are inside. and B) A computer K inside A made by entities (us), also inside the set A, that is running and exploring a _model_ of a set of abstracted (by us) X. We in B you can look at the computer K and say: The universe A, made of X, is computing a computer K running a program that is an abstraction of A. The computing of the computer by the universe A and the computing by K of the abstractions inside the program in the computer K are two utterly different things that are endlessly confused here. The entire 10 years discourse can be characterised as a group of people variously mixing A and B and never realising they were talking about different things while not even knowing which of A or B they are in AND it gets worse. in neither case were they speaking about traditional 'laws of nature'. This is a second cockup. These cockups are factorially confusing. In essence the study of the kind B is a different kind of science. It's not what traditional science, out here in the real world of Dr Colin science, does. B is a different kind of novel scientific enquiry/ epistemology that this list continually fails to recognise. What we do as scientists out here in the non-Everything-list world is not B. Instead we do something different(C). We create abstractions that predict how (A) appears (in a scientist's consciousness ... as a scientific observer) when you are inside it (A) (made of X). These regularities in appearances are NOT the regularities depicted as B. We call C the traditional 'laws of nature'. A completely different kind of epistemology. Then, just to make everything even more confusing ... we scientists (C) then compute the abstract 'laws of nature' C, variously confusing them with the laws in B (= think C and B are the same epistemology), or completely miss B or shun B as metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. B and C are separate epistemologies. Their difference scientifically accounts for consciousness in the form of the scientific observer. So... One underlying unknowable (from the inside) universe A made of something. What that 'something' might be is what B explores. and Two sets of potential abstractions of A: B and C. B depicts/characterises what A is made of whereas C is what it appears like to an observer inside A (you know...atoms and space and stuff). Epistemology C makes the observer predictive of appearances and simultaneously completely fails to contact X or B
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Sat, May 09, 2015 at 03:22:40PM +1200, LizR wrote: On 9 May 2015 at 14:58, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: But to really draw that conclusion requires accepting the absurdity of noncounterfactual program instantiating consciousness. I think more work is actually needed here, as we're talking about very large recordings, something like 1e14 bits per second of consciousness (about 100 Terabytes per second). Replaying this movie in real time is still many orders of magnitude out from current capability. Normal HD movies is only about 500KB per second. However, there is no obvious need to replay the recording in real time. But given those figures we'd certainly want to approach real time, because at the given rate a second of consciousness would require something like 10 years to play back. My point only was that naively extrapolating intuition through 8 orders of magnitude is bound to cause problems. I don't have a stake in the outcome either way - I accept the MWI as the preferred interpretation of QM, where the MGA neither works, nor is needed, as ontology is robust. I'm just trying the critique the argument on its own terms. What does your comment about the MWI mean here? At first sight it appears to be assuming the result - if comp is true then the MWI has to be recovered from the UD (I think). But I could easily be missing the point. No it has nothing to do with that. Physical supervenience in my book is a required feature. Note this is distinctly different from Bruno's primitive physicalist supervenience thesis, and the similar name makes for confusion. Physical supervenience is just the good old garden variety where a change of qualia entails a change of brain state, and has a load of evidence in its favour. The MGA when it boils down to it _is_ an argument showing that computational supervenience and physical supervenience (not the PPST) do not play well together. If we do accept the results of the MGA (and I'm still far from that because of the intuition pump problems), then we also note that the MGA actually fails for a robust ontology, as all counterfactuals are realised in a robust ontology. So if the MGA is valid, the only way to have your cake and eat it (ie computational+physical supervenience) is to accept a robust ontology (which in practice means accepting soemthing like the MWI). Note Bruno has already shown the reversal and that comp and the PPST are incompatible for robust ontologies, which completes his argument. What I'm saying is a corrolory: that to keep physical supervenience (not the PPST) and comp, your ontology needs to be robust. Cheers -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Sat, May 09, 2015 at 01:39:43PM +1200, LizR wrote: It's map and territory, like the finger and the Moon. The finger points to the Moon to indicate it, but isn't itself the Moon. Likewise with 2+2=4 But when the map is in one-to-one correspondence with the territory? Isn't it just the territory then? That's the sort of recording we're talking about here, not some pale imitation. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 5/8/2015 6:38 PM, LizR wrote: On 9 May 2015 at 11:24, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/8/2015 2:58 PM, LizR wrote: On 9 May 2015 at 09:02, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/8/2015 1:33 AM, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 18:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 07 May 2015, at 14:45, Bruce Kellett wrote: We can use an original biological brain, or an equivalent digital replacement -- it does not make any significant difference to the argument. The first point is that in some conscious experience, be it a dream or anything else, there might be a portion of the 'brain' (in quotes because it can be biological or digital) that is not activated, so this can be removed without affecting the conscious experience. This idea of removing unused parts of brain so only active elements remain, seems problematic to me and not just because of counterfactual correctness. The ability to do this is implicit in the assumption that the physics of the brain is classical. But comp is based on the assumption that consciousness is the result of classical computation. If that assumption's wrong then comp fails, of course, from step 0 - no need to worry about the MGA. Bruno points out that a classical computer can compute anything that a quantum computer can so it doesn't exactly fail; what I think it implies that the classical computation must include the environemnt, i.e. all the extra physical degrees of freedom and entanglement that make the brain computation (approximately) classical. That sounds like putting the cart before the horse. The question is, can the brain and environment be extracted from the assumption that consciousness is classical computation? Which is, of course, still an open question. True, it's a problem from either end. If you just assume computation is fundamental then you have to get QM out of it and ALSO the approximate classicality of the physically realized computation. Exactly. That is Bruno's problem. Plus, assuming no quantum entanglement with the environment is involved in consciousness (as seems likely given the decoherence times of neurons etc) That's not taking the QM seriously. QM says that it's the decoherence due to entanglement with the environment that produces the classical behavior. OK, I think even with a little brain I'm beginning to see the point here. I'm not yet sure if it's relevant, however. I think Max Tegmark's point was that the environment of a neuron is other neurons (and the surrounding material - glia, blood, etc) and that everything in a brain is decohering far faster than than the timescales of consciousness. Why would taking the QM seriously prevent the brain behaving as a classical computer on those timescales? Or to move the question into a (perhaps) better known realm, why would it stop a computer running an AI programme behaving as a classical computer? It wouldn't, up to a very good approximation. If the brain is fundamentally different to an AI due to quantum effects, that invalidates comp at step 0 (and possibly invalidates strong AI as well). Well that's where I'm concerned about the difference between saying yes to a doctor who will replace a part of my brain with a physical, quantum mechanical device that is approximately classical (like my neuron was) and saying yes to a doctor who will replace part of my brain with an abstract Turing machine device that acts perfectly classical. I could say yes to the first and no to the second without invoking any magic or superstition (as Bruno accuses me of). I might reflect that the way my neuron came to behave classically was by quantum entanglement with the environment and that might be essential to my consciousness. It wouldn't prevent strong AI, it wouldn't prevent Bruno's argument from going through, it would just require that the scope of the counterfactuals in the MGA encompass essentially everything, because my brain is entangled with practically everything that was ever on my past light cone. Or maybe it can be shown that all that entanglement averages out and makes no difference, i.e. there's not significant difference between mostly classical and exactly classical. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Sat, May 09, 2015 at 03:11:43PM +1200, LizR wrote: On the subject of modifying the recording, let's say we recorded the states of all the brain cells and so on. This would mean that the signals coming in from the senses were encoded in the recording. If we assume the experience was of looking at a red dot, it might be fairly easy to replace the red dot nerve signals with green dot ones. But then you have to change the memories to be of the relevant colour, and any thoughts to reflect that fact... And this is from looking at a dot. Hmm. Yes - maybe my speculation was premature. As you say, it is easy enough to change the details at the optic nerve. But then, because the remainder of the brain's recording is unchanged, there would be no change in perception. Presumably, because consciousness is a fairly hologgraphic affair (although note recent results attributing conscious to a small piece of the brain near the hypothalamus), one needs to make sweeping changes to the recording in order to generate a distinct quale. Mind you, this is a question that is potentially answered by more neuroscience. On 9 May 2015 at 14:59, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 May 2015 at 10:37, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: ISTM, the MGA works in a purely classical physical reality (such as the non-robust case), but not a quantum one (which is a robust case). This is not a problem for Bruno's argument, but it must be clear that the MGA is _only_ relevant for the non-robust case. It's relevant for a robust classical case, which is presumably what is supposed to take place (or exist timelessly) in Platonia. In the robust case, all counterfactuals are physically instantiated, so the MGA fails (or at least Maudlin's version, although I think the MGA does too). -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Sat, May 09, 2015 at 01:41:46PM +1200, LizR wrote: On 9 May 2015 at 13:07, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 09:02:29AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: In 1987, when I present the argument, in the room some come up with similar idea, and I answered. But some told me after that when people come up with idea like a recording is conscious, or 2+2 might Really? Why are people so quick to accept that conscious recordings are absurd? Sure I can understand that Bogie in the screen version of Casablanca is not conscious, but that is not the sort of recording we're talking about. Here we're talking about something like an EEG pattern where every neuron is recorded, as well as the entire connectome. Why is it any more absurd for that to be be conscious than it is for the original lump of grey goo to be conscious? I suspect that saying a recording is conscious is seen as a form of eliminativism - the thinking is something like, if a recording can be conscious, then consciousness can't actually exist. How does that work? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Meat trial
From http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html --- I’m honored that this often shows up on the internet. Here’s the correct version, as published in Omni, 1990. THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT They're made out of meat. Meat? Meat. They're made out of meat. Meat? There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat. That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars? They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines. So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact. They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines. That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat. I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat. Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage. Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat? Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside. Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through. No brain? Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you. So ... what does the thinking? You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat. Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat! Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over? Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat. Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years. Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind? First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual. We're supposed to talk to meat. That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing. They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts? Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat. I thought you just told me they used radio. They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat. Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise? Officially or unofficially? Both. Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing. I was hoping you would say that. It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat? I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here? Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact. So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe. That's it. Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember? They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them. A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream. And we marked the entire sector unoccupied. Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy? Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again. They always come around. And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ... Kim Jones B.Mus.GDTL Email: kimjo...@ozemail.com.au Mobile:0450 963 719 Landline: 02 9389 4239 Web:
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On 9 May 2015 at 11:59, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 12:43:32PM +1200, LizR wrote: Assuming a recording *can* be conscious (i.e. that the MGA's conclusion isn't absurd) then of course it can be. But such a recording is so large (probably consuming all the matter with the visible universe), how can you assert that it's consciousness is absurd? That is what you need to do to make the MGA work... Now you're doing what Brent does - repeating something that's more or less what I said, prefaced by but. I didn't assert it was absurd, I said assuming... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
Indeed. On 9 May 2015 at 12:11, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Saturday, May 9, 2015, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 12:43:32PM +1200, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 05:14, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, May 7, 2015, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: All computational supervenience gets you is that two counterfactually equivalent programs will generate the same conscious state. All bets are off with counterfactually inequivalent programs that nevertheless result in the same physical state. For that you additionally need physical supervenience. The whole business of the recording is how can that physical apparatus replaying the conscious moment actually be conscious, when it is not aware of the environment. As far as computationalism is concerned, the experienced moment has already been experienced, at some previous time and place (there and then). Replaying the recording makes no difference whatsoever. Yet the same sequence of physical states takes place, so in some sense by physical supervenience a new conscious moment is created. I don't think it can be, and I don't think this is what physical supervenience can actually mean. Why can't playing the equivalent of a recording made de novo (i.e. there was no original) instantiate the conscious moment for the first time? Assuming a recording *can* be conscious (i.e. that the MGA's conclusion isn't absurd) then of course it can be. But such a recording is so large (probably consuming all the matter with the visible universe), how can you assert that it's consciousness is absurd? That is what you need to do to make the MGA work... It's getting difficult to work out what everyone is claiming is and isn't absurd. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 12:43:32PM +1200, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 05:14, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, May 7, 2015, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: All computational supervenience gets you is that two counterfactually equivalent programs will generate the same conscious state. All bets are off with counterfactually inequivalent programs that nevertheless result in the same physical state. For that you additionally need physical supervenience. The whole business of the recording is how can that physical apparatus replaying the conscious moment actually be conscious, when it is not aware of the environment. As far as computationalism is concerned, the experienced moment has already been experienced, at some previous time and place (there and then). Replaying the recording makes no difference whatsoever. Yet the same sequence of physical states takes place, so in some sense by physical supervenience a new conscious moment is created. I don't think it can be, and I don't think this is what physical supervenience can actually mean. Why can't playing the equivalent of a recording made de novo (i.e. there was no original) instantiate the conscious moment for the first time? Assuming a recording *can* be conscious (i.e. that the MGA's conclusion isn't absurd) then of course it can be. But such a recording is so large (probably consuming all the matter with the visible universe), how can you assert that it's consciousness is absurd? That is what you need to do to make the MGA work... -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On Saturday, May 9, 2015, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 12:43:32PM +1200, LizR wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 05:14, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com javascript:; wrote: On Thursday, May 7, 2015, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au javascript:; wrote: All computational supervenience gets you is that two counterfactually equivalent programs will generate the same conscious state. All bets are off with counterfactually inequivalent programs that nevertheless result in the same physical state. For that you additionally need physical supervenience. The whole business of the recording is how can that physical apparatus replaying the conscious moment actually be conscious, when it is not aware of the environment. As far as computationalism is concerned, the experienced moment has already been experienced, at some previous time and place (there and then). Replaying the recording makes no difference whatsoever. Yet the same sequence of physical states takes place, so in some sense by physical supervenience a new conscious moment is created. I don't think it can be, and I don't think this is what physical supervenience can actually mean. Why can't playing the equivalent of a recording made de novo (i.e. there was no original) instantiate the conscious moment for the first time? Assuming a recording *can* be conscious (i.e. that the MGA's conclusion isn't absurd) then of course it can be. But such a recording is so large (probably consuming all the matter with the visible universe), how can you assert that it's consciousness is absurd? That is what you need to do to make the MGA work... It's getting difficult to work out what everyone is claiming is and isn't absurd. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 09:02:29AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: In 1987, when I present the argument, in the room some come up with similar idea, and I answered. But some told me after that when people come up with idea like a recording is conscious, or 2+2 might Really? Why are people so quick to accept that conscious recordings are absurd? Sure I can understand that Bogie in the screen version of Casablanca is not conscious, but that is not the sort of recording we're talking about. Here we're talking about something like an EEG pattern where every neuron is recorded, as well as the entire connectome. Why is it any more absurd for that to be be conscious than it is for the original lump of grey goo to be conscious? After all, the ancient Egyptians thought it a prepostuous idea, and would chuck the brains out when mummifying the Pharoahs. I don't think intuition is a reliable guide here, which is why I focus more on counterfactual correctness, which is at least something that can be grasped rigorously. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:47:22AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: All argument in math are from incredulity. Not at all. They should be precise deductions from a given set of premisses, using agreed rules of logic. Even argument by contradiction deductively demonstrates an inconsistency between the premisses. Incredulity has nothing to do with it. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 03:45:53PM -0400, John Clark wrote: On Thu, May 7, 2015 Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: In the case of chaotic systems (or Og for that matter), a hypothetical Laplace daemon could simulate the system using exact initial conditions Even if we ignore Quantum Mechanics that would still be untrue because today we know something that Laplace did not: even very small changes in initial conditions can increase the number of calculations required to make a prediction enormously, it will increase them to infinity if space or time is continuous. And today we know that even in theory it takes time and energy to make a calculation, and the faster you make it the more energy you need. If you calculate too slowly the event you're trying to predict will have already happened before you finish, and if you calculate too quickly you produce so much waste heat you'll alter the system you're trying to predict. That is an interesting objection, but not one that's really relevant to the case at hand (distinguising dynamical chaos from teh FPI). and tell you what will be experienced next. And even if we ignore the above objection the daemon might know what we will do next but the daemon couldn't tell us because then the daemon's own behavior would alter the prediction; I might be of a argumentative frame of mind and be determined to do the exact opposite of whatever the daemon said I was going to do. In that case to figure out what I would do a mega-daemon would be required to figure out what the daemon was going to predict. Obviously before long we'd need a mega-mega-daemon and so on. Assuming Og has free will, of course. If he doesn't, then it doesn't matter what Laplace's daemon tells him. With FPI, Laplace's daemon cannot do that. Not even an infinite string of mega, mega-mega, mega-mega-mega. daemons can answer gibberish questions. True, but you're implying that what my next experience is is a gibberish question, when it clearly isn't. What's more, I can find out just by waiting a bit. the third person answer will always be probabilistic. What I see in the first person not probabalistic. In physics everything is probabilistic and we live in a world governed by the laws of physics. It is definite, and I only need to wait around to find out. And Turing tells us that for some things, like figuring out if a program will stop, you'll have to wait around for a infinite, and not just astronomically large, number of years and even then you still won't find out if it stops or not. Sure - another difference between FPI and the Halting theorem. nobody knows how to make a Turing Machine or a computer or how to make one single calculation without using matter that operates according to the laws of physics. Maybe there is some other way to do it but if there is nobody knows what it is. IMHO, one can never know what it is made out of. That is equivalent to saying the blunders in Bruno's proof can never be repaired. Hardly - that is the result at step 7, nothing to do with your so-called blunders. IMHO, one can go there directly in one step, as it is a pretty obvious conclusion from the CT thesis. Pretty obvious? I agree that any finite program that terminates can be calculated on a Turing Machine, but there is in general no way to know if any given program will terminate or not, and nobody has the slightest idea how to make a Turing Machine, or even anything close to it, without using matter that obeys the laws of physics. What does that have to do with one can never know what it is made out of.? If I am a computation, I cannot tell whether I'm running on a PC or a Mac I remind you that both the Mac and the PC are made of matter that obeys the laws of physics. So? Relevance? I also cannot tell if I'm am running Robinson arithmetic or SK combinators. the precise properties of the ontological material reality (Bruno primitive reality) are not accessible to us I don't need to know what the ultimate primitive reality is (assuming such a thing even exists), I just need to know the relative primitivity of physics and mathematics. Unless Bruno can show that mathematics is more primitive than matter and has found a way to make a calculation that doesn't involve physics his proof is just an exercise in circularity. UDA 1-7 shows that whatever the ultimate primitive reality is, properties of matter (ie physics) must only depend on the fact that the ultimate primitive reality is capable of universal computation. Assuming comp, of course, and robustness of the primitive reality (that a UD is supported). That is why he says arithmetic suffices. Of course you can insists that your ulimate reality is running on something physical like gears/cogs, or electrons in silicon, but nothing about the geariness, or electronicness is
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 01:26:38PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: But I'm interested in Russell's argument that the Chinese Room would have to be so big as to be absurd. ISTM it's not nearly as big as the UD. Is there some principle that rules out things that are to big or to improbable? I always assumed that the CR absurdity worked because the little man inside the room just looked responses up in a book. Clearly, if its a lookup table like this, then the book would be absurdly ginormous. But if the book contained, say a printout of an AI program in C, then indeed it wouldn't be so large. But then the book has rather complex contents, it is not so absurd to think that following its instructions could not instantiate a consciousness, which I think Searle was trying to get us to admit. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: My comments on The Movie Graph Argument Revisited by Russell Standish
On 5/8/2015 12:14 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 08 May 2015, at 02:35, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 10:19:48AM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 8 May 2015 at 10:14, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 03:14:42AM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Why can't playing the equivalent of a recording made de novo (i.e. there was no original) instantiate the conscious moment for the first time? That is such a fantastically improbable outcome that Harry Potter universes are mundane occurrences, and we might as well admit magic into our explanations of reality. Seriously, in that case, all bets are off. Arguments based on intuition (such as the MGA) just fail under those circumstances. I don't think it is fantastically improbable; in fact, in an infinite universe it may be certain. And even if it is fantastically improbable, that does not invalidate the philosophical conclusions. Yes it does, if the philosophical conclusions are based on an intuition (which the MGA is). This is why I draw the comparison with the Chinese room. If all the intelligence is encoded in a book, then intuition says that book cannot be conscious. This intuition is undoubtedly right for the sorts of books we're used to. But for a book that is much, much larger than the visible universe (which it would have to be to encode the intelligence needed to answer the questions in Chinese as a lookup table), then I think that intuition is very much doubtful. Consequently, the Chinese Room argument fails. This was Dan Dennett's point, IIRC. No, because the chinese room use only the program of the chinese man, not necessarily a giant look-up table. The MGA will fail in exactly the same way, in the same circumstance. However, Bruno is quite clear that he doesn't rely on astronomically improbably event ocurring, so this is simply a side issue that needs pinching off. MGA is a definite proof that someone keeping comp and physical supervenience has to invoke non Turing emulable activity in the brain necessary for consciousness. This is not logically absurd, but is still *magic in the comp frame. They could as well invoke the Virgin Mary when they say yes to the doctor. Or they could invoke the continuum. But I'm interested in Russell's argument that the Chinese Room would have to be so big as to be absurd. ISTM it's not nearly as big as the UD. Is there some principle that rules out things that are to big or to improbable? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The dovetailer disassembled
On 5/8/2015 1:00 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2015-05-08 8:39 GMT+02:00 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net: On 5/7/2015 11:24 PM, Jason Resch wrote: If the string of bits is all that is required for conscious, then the cable connected to the camera, or the optic nerve would be visually conscious. But I think those bits need to be interpreted, by the Mars Rover's software, or by the visual cortex, for there to be visual quaila. You know they have been so interpreted when the Rover maneuvers around the rock it saw. Yes, but that's the software that does the interpretation... we did write the software in a way that when it read such or such data, it means in its context, it's a rock. Not necessarily. Maybe the advanced AI computer on the Mars Rover is a wetware neural net that we evolved in simulations before putting it in the Rover and it has learned about rocks. If there is no interpreter, no software, there is no meaning... But the software interprets what has context to it... that meaning is an internal notion, that does not preclude the absolute real realness outside the interpretation itself... Programs have only access to memory... No, that's the point. Programs that can actually appear intelligent and so either be conscious or prove that philosophical zombies exist (which most people reject) also interact with the environment. I think you have and overly restrictive idea of program vs memory, the two are fungible there's no sharp difference. You can compute by where your program chooses to store bits. For conscious program you should have stable inputs, so the memory locations where the program interact with an inferred external world, must be stable enough to look like an external world... But not so stable it doesn't change with new information. Human brains have a different model of the world than they did 400yrs ago, and I have a different model of what's in my garage than I did 15min ago. that's enough to infer its existence and believe that from its POV it must be embedded in something bigger... platonia is bigger... way bigger than needed, that's why there should be a measure that explain the stability we see (again that's if and only if we are computational entities at the start... ie: if computationalism is true...) I agree. To be useful, there must be a tractable way (practical) Computable? that this measure could be extracted and compared to the world we experience... if not, even if conceptually it seems the best about consciousness and our real, it will stay as an in principle. The falsifiability must be able to be tested in practice... if not, I hardly see how one can say the theory is falsifiable. That's more or less what I've been saying. The theory may be true but (almost) useless. It may be that finding the right measure to extract physics from the UD is like finding the one time pad for decoding the world. The argument leads one away from this because it assumes that consciousness can be this isolated process. That's why the MGA starts with assuming the consciousness is consciousness of a dream...to avoid the external references of the brain states. But the references are there anyway even if they're not from immediate perception. I qualified that as almost useless, because it may explicate something about the mind-body problem even if we can't decode the measure. Brent Quentin Brent The bits alone are not enough. Otherwise sqrt(2) or Pi might as well be theories of everything. Jason On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:19 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/7/2015 11:10 PM, Jason Resch wrote: Recordings, absent interpretation, are devoid of meaning and don't exist for anyone (like the unheard tree fall). Absent interpretation any string of bits is meaningless because depending on how it is interpreted it could mean anything (see one time pad encryption). Consciousness requires both information and something to be informed, Something to be informed is just a ghost in the machine. All that's required is that the information, the string of bits, refer to something, something that can be interacted with. This is easily seen in my favorite example of the AI Mars Rover. The string of bits represents There's a big rock in front of me because it leads to maneuvering around the rock. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com
