http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian
Best quote from the best "gothic western" ever:
"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had
you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness
it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine
On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>>
>> BUT, if there is significant suffering likely in the worlds where I
>> lose, I might very well focus making a choice that will minimize that
>> suffering. In which case I will generally not base much of my
>> decision on the "probabil
if I make the "safe" suffering-minimizing bet in this
branch, I know that in a closely related branch I will make the risky
"gain-maximizing" bet and say to hell with the Kellys in the losing
worlds.
So I know that even if I make the safe bet, there's another Kelly two
wo
On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> Since you told me that you accept comp, after all, and do no more
> oppose it to your view, I think we agree, at least on many things.
> Indeed you agree with the hypothesis, and your philosophy appears to
> be a consequence of the hypoth
On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> Actually I still have no clue of what you mean by "information".
Well, I don't think I can say it much better than I did before:
In my view, there are ungrounded abstract symbols that acquire
meaning via constraints placed on them by
27;t do
anything with respect to the production of consciousness. The output
informational states represented by data on tape exists platonically
even if the Turing machine program is never run. And therefore the
consciousness that goes with those states also exists platonically,
even if the Turi
On May 23, 12:54 pm, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> Either of these ideas is definite
> enough that they could actually be implemented (in contrast to many
> philosophical ideas about consciousness).
Once you had implemented the ideas, how would you then know whether
consciousness experience had actu
stance of such talking heads to be
observed. But once you've abandoned the external universe and
embraced platonism, then where does the constraint against observing
talking heads come from?
Assuming platonism, I can explain why "I" don't see talking heads:
because every pos
Okay, below are three passages that I think give a good sense of what
I mean by "information" when I say that "consciousness is
information". The first is from David Chalmers' "Facing up to the
Problem of Consciousness." The second is from the SEP article on
"Semantic Conceptions of Information"
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> I agree with your critic of "consciousness = information". This is "not
> even wrong",
Ouch! Et tu, Bruno???
> and Kelly should define what he means by "information" so
> that we could
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> On the contrary, I think it does. First, I think Chalmers idea that
> vitalists recognized that all that needed explaining was structure and
> function is revisionist history. They were looking for the animating
> spirit. It is in hind
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 4:22 PM, George Levy wrote:
> Kelly Harmon wrote:
>
> What if you used a lookup table for only a single neuron in a computer
> simulation of a brain?
>
>
> Hi Kelly
>
> Zombie arguments involving look up tables are faulty because look up tabl
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 9:13 PM, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
>> Generally I don't think that what we experience is necessarily caused
>> by physical systems. I think that sometimes physical systems assume
>> configurations that "shadow", or represent, our conscious experience.
>> But they don't CAUSE
On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 12:32 AM, Jesse Mazer wrote:
>
> I don't have a problem with the idea that a giant lookup table is just a
> sort of "zombie", since after all the way you'd create a lookup table for a
> given algorithmic mind would be to run a huge series of actual simulations
> of that mi
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 8:07 AM, John Mikes wrote:
>
> A fitting computer simulation would include ALL aspects involved - call it
> mind AND body, 'physically' observable 'activity' and 'consciousness as
> cause' -- but alas, no such thing so far. Our embryonic machine with its
> binary algorithm
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 6:43 AM, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
>
> Therefore I think that I answer your question: it´s not only
> information; It´s about a certain kind of information and their own
> processor. The exact nature of this processor that permits qualia is
> not known; that’s true, and it´s
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 2:03 AM, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> Do you suppose that something could behave just as humans do yet not be
> conscious, i.e. could there be a philosophical zombie?
I think that somewhere there would have to be a conscious experience
associated with the production of the beh
I think your discussing the functional aspects of consciousness. AKA,
the "easy problems" of consciousness. The question of how human
behavior is produced.
My question was what is the source of "phenomenal" consciousness.
What is the absolute minimum requirement which must be met in order
for c
On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 6:18 PM, Colin Hales
wrote:
>
> My ability to mentally manipulate mathematics therefore makes me a
> powerful lord of reality and puts me in a position of great authority and
> clarity.
Aren't people who are good at math already pretty much in this
position? Engineering,
Another good one:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8012496.stm
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On Apr 29, 2:26 am, russell standish wrote:
>
> What extra information do you have in mind? I'd gladly update my
> priors with anything I can lay my hands on.
So changes to neural structure and the concentrations of various
chemicals within neurons and around neural synapses is known to change
c
On Apr 27, 1:42 pm, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> Are you thinking of something like a linked list in which each state, in
> it's inherent information, has a pointer to a previous (or future)
> state. And the existence of this link constitutes the "feeling of flow"?
H. As a metaphor that works I
On Apr 27, 3:08 am, Jason Resch wrote:
>
> Your position as you have described it sounds a lot like ASSA only
> without taking measure into consideration. I am curious if you
> believe there is any merit to counting OMs or not. Meaning, if I have
> two computers and set them up to run simulatio
On Apr 27, 12:23 pm, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> So you have indeed the necessity to abandon comp to maintain your form
> of immaterialist platonism, but then you lose the tool for questioning
> nature. It almost look like choosing a theory because it does not even
> address the question ?
Okay, g
On Apr 27, 2:27 am, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> An untestable theory. But that's OK since if it's true it's also useless.
Ha! True, true. But it being true AND useless would have a certain
aesthetic/poetic appeal. Which makes me even more inclined to think
that this is the way things are.
Of co
On Apr 26, 11:40 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> The question is; what are their relative probability measure? What can
> I expect.
Any expectations you have are unfounded. The problem of induction
applies.
Any probabilities arrived at empirically are suspect, they will
continue to hold for some
On Apr 26, 12:47 pm, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> No, I think you're missing my point. Consider your analogy of fitting
> together images to make a complete picture. You present this as a
> spatial representation of the sequential flow of consciousness. Now
> suppose your spatial elements have zero
On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 9:00 PM, Jason Resch
wrote:
>
> In fact I used that same argument with Russell
> Standish when he said that ants aren't conscious because if they were
> then we should expect to be experiencing life as ants and not humans.
Did you win or lose that argument?
I've heard t
On Apr 26, 2:01 pm, Jason Resch wrote:
> I am not sure that the measure problem can be so easily
> abandoned/ignored. Assuming every Observer Moment had has an equal
> measure, then the random/white-noise filled OMs should vastly
> outnumber the ordered and sensible OMs.
The ordered and sensibl
On Apr 26, 1:08 am, Brent Meeker wrote:
> These are "edges" in time, i.e. a future boundary and a past boundary.
> If these two boundaries are different then we are not longer talking
> about a state, we're talking about an interval, furthermore an interval
> that has duration and direction.
Uhh
On Apr 24, 11:39 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> > At any given instant that I'm awake, I'm
> > conscious of SOMETHING.
>
> To predict something, the difficulty is to relate that consciousness
> to its computational histories. Physics is given by a measure of
> probability on those comp histories.
Th
On Apr 24, 3:14 am, Jason Resch wrote:
> Kelly,
>
> Your arguments are compelling and logical, you have put a lot of doubt
> in my mind about computationalism.
Excellent!
It sounds like you are following the same path as I did on all of
this.
So it makes sense to start with
of you that never sees anything that strikes you as
unusual and who says "the universe is very normal, and this all makes
perfect sense, and how could it be any other way. These people who
advocate extreme platonism are crazy, because it doesn't match what I
observe."
But, there will
On Apr 22, 12:24 pm, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> So for that to be a plausible scenario we have to
>> say that a person at a particular instant in time can be fully
>> described by some set of data.
>
> Not fully. I agree with Brent that you need an interpreter to make
> that person manifest herself
On Apr 22, 2:02 pm, Brent Meeker wrote:
> I was with you up to that last sentence. Forward or backward, we just
> experience increasing entropy as increasing time, but that doesn't
> warrant the conclusion that no process is required and an "instant"
> within itself has an arrow of time.
It see
On Apr 21, 2:33 pm, Brent Meeker wrote:
> These states can belong to more than one sequence of
> conscious experience. But the question is whether the order of the
> states in the computation is always the same as their order in any
> sequence of conscious experience in which they appear? For ex
On Apr 21, 11:31 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> We could say that a state A access to a state B if there is a
> universal machine (a universal number relation) transforming A into B.
> This works at the ontological level, or for the third person point of
> view. But if A is a consciousness related st
On Apr 20, 3:27 am, Jason Resch wrote:
> If I sent you an arbitrary binary string, it would have no meaning
> unless you either knew in advance how to interpret it or how it was
> produced. Either interpretation or understanding of how it was
> produced can be described with computer programs, b
On Apr 20, 8:14 am, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> The drawback is that any physical system (which could be mapped onto
> any information or any computation) would be conscious. This is only a
> drawback if you believe, I guess as a matter of faith, that it is
> false.
Right, the "Putnam mapping
On Apr 20, 2:04 am, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> The main difficulty I see is that it fails to explain the sequential
> aspect of consciousness. If consciousness is identified with
> information then it is atemporal.
>
Time is just the dimension of experience. But experience is an
internal "psychol
What is the advantage of assigning consciousness to computational
processes (e.g. UDA), as opposed to just assigning it to the
information that is produced by computational processes?
For example, to take Maudlin's "Computation and Consciousness" paper,
if you just say that the consciousness is f
ory-line of the
dream was entirely seperate.
As for the metaphysical implications of "identifying the self with
personal memories", I'll have to think about that a bit more.
All good stuff!
On Mar 30, 6:30 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Hi Kelly, and others,
>
> Well, thank
I tried Salvia for the first time yesterday. Very similar to
dreaming, but more intense, with a lot more sounds.
At first I thought, "Nothing's happening". Then I thought, "I seem to
be about to slide sidewise...I need to stop".
Then, I was sitting somewhere...in a tilled field I think, and I
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