Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 22-mai-05, à 17:03, Stathis Papaioannou wrote (in part): The response of those who think that consciousness is nothing special to the above is that it is not surprising that there is a difference between a description of an object and the object itself, and that what I have called knowledge in reference to conscious experiences is not really knowledge, but part of the package that comes with being a thing. I can't really argue against this; as I said, it is just a different way of looking at the same facts. Exactly. And that is something utterly important, I think, which people always forget. This his has been understand and explained recurrently in humanity life. As example I have found it rather explicitly state 1) An indian text of the eleventh century (I think): Drg-Drçya-Viveka, Comment discriminer le spectateur du spectacle ?, Traduction de la version anglaisse due à Nikhilânanda par Marcel Sauton, Librairie d'Amérique et d'Orient, Adrien Maisonneuve, Paris. 2) The old Wittgenstein in his last book on uncertainty, where he says that to know and to believe could be the same state of mind, but in different context. 3) The Plato's Theaetetus, when he defined knowing by justified true belief. 4) Stathis (see above). Er ... Correct me if I am wrong ;) 5) Boolos, Goldblatt, Kuznetsov and Muravitski: when they discover that G* proves that Bp is equivalent with (Bp and p), but that G does not prove it, so that the logic of Cp = (Bp and p) gives a knower logic. Bp and (Bp and p) are just different way of looking to the same arithmetical fact, but the (godelian) gap between proof (G) and truth (G*) makes both logics quite different. Stephen: it is the logic of Cp, (= Bp p) which give rise to S4Grz (the canonical machine first person knower/time logic). Those who does not understand the 4) should take it as an advertising for Smullyan's Forever Undecided, and the whole Godel Lob provability/consistency field. Bruno PS Axiom of G and G*, and S4Grz can be found in my 1999 post to the list: http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m1417.html http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis: Now, I think you will agree (although Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what the experience is actually like. Jonathan Colvin: No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But this is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an excellent understanding of photons, we can not travel at the speed of light, or that although we may have an excellent understanding of trees, yet we can not photosynthesize. Neither of these problems seem particularly hard. Bruno: But we can photosynthesize. And we can understand why we cannot travel at the speed of light. All this by using purely 3-person description of those phenomena in some theory. With consciousness, the range of the debate goes from non-existence to only-existing. The problem is that it seems that an entirely 3-person explanation of the brain-muscles relations evacuates any purpose for consciousness and the 1-person. That's not the case with photosynthesis. You can photosynthesize? I certainly can not (not being a tree). If I had photosynthetic pigments in my skin, I suppose I could; and if I had rubbery wings and sharp teeth I'd be a bat (if my aunt had wheels, she'd be a wagon). I still can not see (intellectually) the problem of consciousness. Consciousness /qualia, 1st person phenomena, etc, IMHO, being very poorly defined, and likely non-existing entities, are a precarious pillar to base any cosmology or metaphysics on. Observer is far superior, and lacks the taint of dualism. To borrow a page from Penrose, I see qualia in much the same light as a shadow. Everyone can agree what a shadow is, point to one, and talk about them. But a shadow is not a thing. The ancients made much ado about shadows, ascribing all sorts of metaphysical significance and whatnot to them. I think it is quite likely that the fuss about consciousness and qualia resurrects this old mistake. Shadows of the mind, indeed. Jonathan Colvin
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
** Interleaving; *** Bruno: But we can photosynthesize. And we can understand why we cannot travel at the speed of light. All this by using purely 3-person description of those phenomena in some theory. With consciousness, the range of the debate goes from non-existence to only-existing. The problem is that it seems that an entirely 3-person explanation of the brain-muscles relations evacuates any purpose for consciousness and the 1-person. That's not the case with photosynthesis. JC: You can photosynthesize? I certainly can not (not being a tree). If I had photosynthetic pigments in my skin, I suppose I could; and if I had rubbery wings and sharp teeth I'd be a bat (if my aunt had wheels, she'd be a wagon). I still can not see (intellectually) the problem of consciousness. I said I can photosynthetize, like I would said I can fly by taking a plane. I can photosynthetize by building some voltaic cells. This is not the case with the brain-consciousness relation. A thorough understanding of how the brain functions *seems* to put away any purpose of consciousness. A thorough understanding of photosynthesis does not lead to an equivalent problem. * By consciousness, I think you mean qualia. Consciousness can easily be conflated with self-awareness, which has an evolutionary purpose (it enables us to step outside our own minds (treat them as virtual machines), and thus anticipate our own and others' actions). * I still can not see (intellectually) the problem of consciousness. It is the problem of relating first person subjective private experience with third person sharable theories and experiments. There is a vast literature. A good intro is Tye, M. (1995). Ten problems of consciousness. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. * If you deny (as I do) that there is such a thing as first person subjective experience (qualia) the problem goes away. * Consciousness /qualia, 1st person phenomena, etc, IMHO, being very poorly defined, Universes, matter, existence,... are also not well defined. Perhaps you are not interested in such problems. The success of natural science is due in great part to the simplifying assumption of psychophysico-parallelism. I have proved such an assumption is just incompatible with the computationalist assumption in cognitive science. I have also reduce the problem of the existence of the 1-person to the problem of the existence of third person sharable truth. And partially solve it. My problem: few physicist knows what axiomatic methodology is. It is the art of reasoning without even trying to define the concept on which we reason. We need just to agree on properties bearing on those things, captured by formula and inference rules. Mathematicians proceed in this way since more than one century now. and likely non-existing entities, What about the person's right? What about pleasure and pain, ... It seems to me you just excluded those things from your definition of science, and I'm afraid you make the category error I have describe recently. Rights, pleasure, pain...I don't deny we can talk about these (like shadows) *as if* they actually exist, but they do not fall into the same category of things as electrons and universes, or indeed any other part of Platonia. I do indeed exclude them from science, but I think the category error is not mine. are a precarious pillar to base any cosmology or metaphysics on. With comp, we just have no choice in the matter. If you are interested at some point we can follow the proof step by step. I'm always interested where, precisely, some people have some difficulties. To borrow a page from Penrose, I see qualia in much the same light as a shadow. As an (arithmetical) platonist this is how I conceive anything physical. Qualia are more colourful it seems to me. Wave lenght looks more like shadows imo. *** I am also an arithmetical Platonist, but where we differ is our belief in the relevance of 1st person phenomena. I just don't see that they are relevant to anything other than human
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Lee, What you are describing here is panpsychism. If I insist that it is impossible to know whether and in what way an entity is conscious without actually *being* that entity oneself, then to be consistent I have to admit that anything and everything might be conscious. OK; I admit it; technically, I'm a panpsychist. However, I can treat this belief in the same way as I treat a belief in solipsism. Looking at the world around me, other humans behave in roughly the same way I do, so by analogy with my own experience, I assume they are conscious. Rocks, on the other hand, display no behaviour, so I assume they are not conscious. Animals fall somewhere between humans and rocks, so I assume they have varying levels of consciousness depending on the complexity of their nervous system. The implicit theory behind this classification scheme is that consciousness is associated with the sort of information processing that occurs in organisms with central nervous systems. Using empathy as a substitute for direct experience, I can't be absolutely sure of this, of course, but then I can't be absolutely sure that the world doesn't disappear when I turn my back on it, either. Now to my aliens. It is a nuisance when discussing philosophy of mind that we cannot switch our consciousness off in order to study it as disinterested observers. Addressing this problem, my hypothetical aliens are intelligent but non-conscious or differently-conscious. I did not state this in my last post, so you may have assumed that any intelligent entity would be conscious. Maybe this is so; maybe it is even the case that any aliens able to study us at all must have enough in common with us to recognise us as fellow conscious entities. However, for the sake of argument, I wanted to eliminate the kind of empathy that allows us to believe that other humans or animals are conscious. The point I wanted to make is that *only* through empathy (as a substitute for direct experience) would the aliens recognise us as conscious. There is nothing they could go on from our behaviour alone, no matter how well they understood it, that would provide them with an idea of what it is like to be human from the point of view of a human. Even if they had derived some rule through contact with multiple species, eg. any organism able to count to ten is conscious, this would only be understood as an abstraction unless they were in some way able to empathise with us. --Stathis Papaioannou Stathis writes photon or to *be* a tree photosynthesising. Most people would say that photons and trees aren't conscious, and therefore they *can* be entirely understood from a 3rd person perspective. On this list?? You think that most people *here* presume that photons and trees are not conscious? On what grounds could they possibly think that? After all, Consciousness is Deeply Mysterious, and thus might penetrate anything or everything to an unknown degree. In fact, it may turn out that there exists an inverse square law: something is Conscious precisely to the square of the degree that it *appears* to us not to be conscious. (The appearance of consciousness and evidently conscious exchanges between Conscious entities, you see, serves as an outlet, and diminishes True Consciousness.) Why not? Perhaps this is true, but it is not logically consistent to say that it must be true and still maintain the 1st person/ 3rd person distinction we have been discussing. This is because the whole point of the distinction is that it is not possible to deduce or understand that which is special about 1st person experience (namely, consciousness) from an entirely 3rd person perspective. Yes, in other words, it is ineffable. The aliens I have described in my example [who were very clever and who could manufacture consciousness in objects under their control] could be as different from us as we are different from trees, and they could easily conclude that an emulation of our minds is not fundamentally different from an emulation of our weather. Oh my. So while I understood earlier from you that your Martians were wizards at creating human consciousness in objects, I didn't gather that they *themselves* were possibly not anything-like-conscious. Have I misunderstood anything? Lee _ SEEK: Over 80,000 jobs across all industries at Australia's #1 job site. http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis writes If I insist that it is impossible to know whether and in what way an entity is conscious without actually *being* that entity oneself, then to be consistent I have to admit that anything and everything might be conscious. OK; I admit it; technically, I'm a panpsychist. However, I can treat this belief in the same way as I treat a belief in solipsism. It's possible that a fundamental division between us is the quest for certainty. It's a mistaken idea, with IMO, a tragic history, to worry about absolute certainty. It's unattainable in any event. So on a literal level, I agree: to be consistent we have to admit that anything and everything **might** be conscious. But that's absurd. I say that it is absurd to entertain highly unlikely cases as being true, unless one is making some important philosophic point of some kind. I am glad that you then say that you treat your belief in panpsychism the way that you treat belief in solipsism; namely ---if I may be so bold as to come out plainly and say it---you just don't buy it. That is, you think it highly unlikely to be true. Looking at the world around me, other humans behave in roughly the same way I do, so by analogy with my own experience, I assume they are conscious. Rocks, on the other hand, display no behaviour, so I assume they are not conscious. Yes, exactly. We are in the position of people in the 14th century who had only a vague idea of what warmth and heat was. But just in the way that a one of them might presciently maintain that (a) warmth is a real, not merely subjective phenomenon, yes, a 1st person experience but much much more importantly some kind of scientific phenomenon in the world and (b) someday careful investigators (i.e. scientists) will someday pin it down, so today are *we* about consciousness: although *certainty* will never be achieved, some day an extremely careful examination of a physical object---the way that it manipulates information---will reveal whether it is conscious or not. In the meantime, we can only guess. Just as a 14th century person might say well I don't know *exactly* what warmth is, that iceberg, by God, is *not* warm, and someday what I am saying will be quantified, so we can say rocks are *not* conscious, and someday it will be proved. (Again, with the caveat that all knowledge is conjectural, and nothing is ever proved beyond doubt.) More likely, of course, in keeping with my temperature analogy, it will one day be proved that rocks have almost zero consciousness, ants have a piddling amount, and dogs are very conscious. Animals fall somewhere between humans and rocks, so I assume they have varying levels of consciousness depending on the complexity of their nervous system. The implicit theory behind this classification scheme is that consciousness is associated with the sort of information processing that occurs in organisms with central nervous systems. We agree completely here. Using empathy as a substitute for direct experience, I can't be absolutely sure of this, of course, but then I can't be absolutely sure that the world doesn't disappear when I turn my back on it, either. Yes, and so don't worry about it. You can't be absolutely sure of *anything*! Now to my aliens. It is a nuisance when discussing philosophy of mind that we cannot switch our consciousness off in order to study it as disinterested observers. Addressing this problem, my hypothetical aliens are intelligent but non-conscious or differently-conscious. I did not state this in my last post, so you may have assumed that any intelligent entity would be conscious. For all practical purposes, and maybe for *all* purposes, we can safely assume that any naturally evolved process that makes maps of its surroundings, cunningly contrives to control its environment to the point that it can survive, responds intelligently to challenges ---such a being is almost beyond doubt conscious. The only counter- examples I know of are extremely contrived, extremely bizarre, and involve almost infinitely much in the way of memory resources and process time. Maybe this is so; maybe it is even the case that any aliens able to study us at all must have enough in common with us to recognise us as fellow conscious entities. However, for the sake of argument, I wanted to eliminate the kind of empathy that allows us to believe that other humans or animals are conscious. The point I wanted to make is that *only* through empathy (as a substitute for direct experience) would the aliens recognise us as conscious. There is nothing they could go on from our behaviour alone, no matter how well they understood it, that would provide them with an idea of what it is like to be human from the point of view of a human. Okay, but I'd say that *all* they have to go by is what all the rest of us have to go by: behavior. You think that someone or something is conscious only by virtue of its
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis writes photon or to *be* a tree photosynthesising. Most people would say that photons and trees aren't conscious, and therefore they *can* be entirely understood from a 3rd person perspective. On this list?? You think that most people *here* presume that photons and trees are not conscious? On what grounds could they possibly think that? After all, Consciousness is Deeply Mysterious, and thus might penetrate anything or everything to an unknown degree. In fact, it may turn out that there exists an inverse square law: something is Conscious precisely to the square of the degree that it *appears* to us not to be conscious. (The appearance of consciousness and evidently conscious exchanges between Conscious entities, you see, serves as an outlet, and diminishes True Consciousness.) Why not? Perhaps this is true, but it is not logically consistent to say that it must be true and still maintain the 1st person/ 3rd person distinction we have been discussing. This is because the whole point of the distinction is that it is not possible to deduce or understand that which is special about 1st person experience (namely, consciousness) from an entirely 3rd person perspective. Yes, in other words, it is ineffable. The aliens I have described in my example [who were very clever and who could manufacture consciousness in objects under their control] could be as different from us as we are different from trees, and they could easily conclude that an emulation of our minds is not fundamentally different from an emulation of our weather. Oh my. So while I understood earlier from you that your Martians were wizards at creating human consciousness in objects, I didn't gather that they *themselves* were possibly not anything-like-conscious. Have I misunderstood anything? Lee
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Lee, There are some things that can be known by examination of an object, and there are other things that can only be known by being the object. When the object is a human brain, this latter class of things is consciousness. (When the object is something else, this latter class of thing is... well, how would I know?) I think that the distinction between these two types of knowledge is surprising, and I would never have noticed it had I not been conscious myself. I also think that there is a sense in which this special first person knowledge can be called fundamental, because by definition it cannot be derived from any other fact about the universe. The response of those who think that consciousness is nothing special to the above is that it is not surprising that there is a difference between a description of an object and the object itself, and that what I have called knowledge in reference to conscious experiences is not really knowledge, but part of the package that comes with being a thing. I can't really argue against this; as I said, it is just a different way of looking at the same facts. Much has been written about particular formulations of the mind/body problem (or, if you prefer, problem). For example, Douglas Hofstadter's commentary on Thomas Nagel's famous essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (which I looked up at your suggestion) makes the point that the logic of the titular question itself is muddled: if Nagel were a bat, he would not be Nagel, and he would therefore not be Nagel asking the question. If Nagel were actually asking what it would be like for him to stay Nagel and experience being a bat, perhaps by having his brain stimulated in a batty way, then that is (a) a different question, and (b) in theory possible, and not the intractable problem originally advertised. This is fair enough, so I shall try to avoid talking about qualia in the way Nagel does. However, I can't get rid of the idea that there is something special and fundamental about first person experience. --Stathis Papaioannou Stathis writes I did not mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness. It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines. Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this through surreptitious study of humans over a number of decades. Their models of human brain function are so good that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their environment they can predict their behaviour better than the humans can themselves. Well put. An interesting point to add is that since human behavior is almost surely not compressible, the *only* way that they can learn what a human is going to do is to, in effect, run one (the mocked up one in their lab). As you say, they run an *emulation*. But this could mean that they had *no* special insight into consciousness, because by adjusting the teleporter, Scotty can find out things too just by making a physical copy of the Captain, and, for example, finding out what he'd say about giving the engineers a raise. But you have described Martian science very well. Here is what I think that they are capable of that *is* important: they could tell (or announce) with very high accuracy whether a species was conscious, and to what extent, in its natural environment, and do all this just from the creature's DNA (and perhaps a little info on the inter- uterine environment). Here is an analogy: in a cold hut in the Scottish highlands in 1440, two bright, but shivering, people are debating the nature of warmth. Says one: Brrr. Some day the scientists will be so advanced that the can objectively measure hotness, and you and I will more closely agree. And he turned out to be right, as we know now. Now, I think you will agree (although Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what the experience is actually like. Yes, but what does that mean? What does it mean for, say, you to know what it's like when I play 1. e4 in a game of chess? I can tell you that it's probably nothing at all like when *you* play 1. e4. But it's strickly a function of how similar our chess careers have been, whether we both have the same opinion of the Alapin counter to the Sicilian, and so forth. So in effect, it really comes down to how much you are already me when you play 1. e4. Somebody here said it much better than I: they said that you have to almost be someone to in order to know what it's like to be them. Jonathan then says No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But this is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an excellent understanding of photons, we can not travel at
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 22-mai-05, à 10:13, Lee Corbin a écrit : [Stathis] Perhaps this is true, but it is not logically consistent to say that it must be true and still maintain the 1st person/ 3rd person distinction we have been discussing. This is because the whole point of the distinction is that it is not possible to deduce or understand that which is special about 1st person experience (namely, consciousness) from an entirely 3rd person perspective. Yes, in other words, it is ineffable. Exactly. Like consistency for sound or just consistent machines, if you simplify ineffable by unprovable. (Godel's second incompleteness theorem) Please, don't infer that I identify consciousness and consistency, but I do think consciousness is a logical descendant of consistency. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis writes There are some things that can be known by examination of an object, and there are other things that can only be known by being the object. Okay; but some examples are probably necessary. (1) Only Mozart can know what it's like for the Mozart auditory system to hear C-sharp on a harpsichord. (2) only a human being can know the feeling that a human has at the loss of a family member. (Those are the best I could do; can anybody come up with better ones?) Note that my first example had this same peculiar linguistic structure of what-it-is-like-to-be. Not necessarily an indictment; but something to notice. As for my second example: are feelings knowledge? When the object is a human brain, this latter class of things is consciousness. (When the object is something else, this latter class of thing is... well, how would I know?) I think that the distinction between these two types of knowledge is surprising, and I would never have noticed it had I not been conscious myself. As you write (below), it's possibly debatable whether this really is *knowledge*. Certainly it does not resemble the usual kind of knowledge that is communicated from one person to another. But here is my analysis of what knowledge is: Knowledge is an internal map of something usually outside of the skin. But then, a gunshot patient may also obtain knowledge provided by his doctors of the exact location of a bullet in his brain. Still, this is *knowledge* of what conditions obtain in the physical world, encoded into a yet different area of the patient's brain. Are there other examples of knowledge? This is important because, of course, one may be pressed to make the case for consciousness *itself* to provide special knowledge (of the non-communicable variety). The response of those who think that consciousness is nothing special to the above is that it is not surprising that there is a difference between a description of an object and the object itself, and that what I have called knowledge in reference to conscious experiences is not really knowledge, but part of the package that comes with being a thing. I can't really argue against this; as I said, it is just a different way of looking at the same facts. Good. You anticipated my question. But your answer is oddly interesting in a certain way: I would never have conflated this question about what is knowledge with the difference between the description of an object and the object itself. Yet, it's true: they are both examples of the map versus the territory. Interesting. I wonder if this knower/known distinction can help even further. After all, I might claim that in all the cases of this suspicious different kind of knowledge, it's as if those who see the problem are trying to establish this difference between the knower and the known in a case in which there isn't any actual difference. In fact, the whole erection of the notion of *qualia* seems now to me to be an effort to impose the knower/known dichotomy where it doesn't apply. Hence the peculiar English language construction of what it is like to be a (A good test to apply to doubtful cases where there may simply be a semantic problem is to demand restatement using other terms. For example, I am highly critical of the word rights used in the abstract, such as what gives X the right to do A?. So I challenge people to try to say the same thing without using the word right. As near as I recall, they don't succeed without greatly reducing the impact of what they want to say. So perhaps a good challenge is this: we could try to articulate Nagel's question without the construction what it is like to be) Much has been written about particular formulations of the mind/body problem (or, if you prefer, problem). For example, Douglas Hofstadter's commentary on Thomas Nagel's famous essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (which I looked up at your suggestion) makes the point that the logic of the titular question itself is muddled: if Nagel were a bat, he would not be Nagel, and he would therefore not be Nagel asking the question. If Nagel were actually asking what it would be like for him to stay Nagel and experience being a bat, perhaps by having his brain stimulated in a batty way, then that is (a) a different question, and (b) in theory possible, and not the intractable problem originally advertised. This is fair enough, so I shall try to avoid talking about qualia in the way Nagel does. However, I can't get rid of the idea that there is something special and fundamental about first person experience. Yeah! I know the feeling! :-) I myself can't shake the feeling that there *isn't* anything special about first person experience. Thanks very much both for your effort to consult that source, and, as usual, your perceptiveness and eloquence in explicating a difficult matter. Lee
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis: People certainly seem to take their consciousness seriously on this list! I've now managed to alienate both the consciousness doesn't really exist and the it exists and we can explain it factions. I did not mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness. It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines. Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this through surreptitious study of humans over a number of decades. Their models of human brain function are so good that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their environment they can predict their behaviour better than the humans can themselves. Now, I think you will agree (although Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what the experience is actually like. No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But this is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an excellent understanding of photons, we can not travel at the speed of light, or that although we may have an excellent understanding of trees, yet we can not photosynthesize. Neither of these problems seem particularly hard. Jonathan Colvin
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 05:39:42AM -0700, James N Rose wrote: Agreed that colour is not a characteristic of an object in itself. How does this impact on the debate, however? Russell, Realize first that you just easily and aggreably opted to completely negate Platonic 'real v. ideal' as a flawed logic. Identification of 'essential qualia' is no longer an a priori valid 'given'. By next logical extension of this de-validation, which qualia - assigned to an entity by way of external evaluation of the entity - represent qualia which the entity functions on immediately and intimately because the entity internally has an information link to it? The school prank of putting a secretly taped sign on a friends back saying 'kick me' .. the conscious performance of the student -excludes- a qualia which the environmental world identifies -with- the student-with-sign. A description of a system, and a system in and of itself, can never and will never map perfectly one to one and on to. QED Conclusions: 1. Initial condition alternatives result in alternate eventstream outcomes. 2. Alternate information sets preclude precision cloning, performances, decision gates. 3. Conscious is not perfectly transferrable. Jamie Sorry, but you've completely lost me here. I'm still looking for relevance... What does your first sentence mean, for example. What is Platonic ideal vs real? Is it Plato's cave metaphor? In which case, I don't remember Plato's cave being brought up in discussion on this list. It doesn't seem terribly relevant to me, or even to notions of arithmetic platonism for example. Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Jonathan Colvin wrote: Stathis: People certainly seem to take their consciousness seriously on this list! I've now managed to alienate both the consciousness doesn't really exist and the it exists and we can explain it factions. I did not mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness. It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines. Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this through surreptitious study of humans over a number of decades. Their models of human brain function are so good that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their environment they can predict their behaviour better than the humans can themselves. Now, I think you will agree (although Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what the experience is actually like. No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But this is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an excellent understanding of photons, we can not travel at the speed of light, or that although we may have an excellent understanding of trees, yet we can not photosynthesize. Neither of these problems seem particularly hard. Jonathan Colvin We are thus at an impasse, agreeing on all the facts but differing in our appraisal of the facts. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Chat with 1000s of sexy singles at Lavalife! http://lavalife9.ninemsn.com.au/
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 21-mai-05, à 08:31, Jonathan Colvin a écrit : Stathis: People certainly seem to take their consciousness seriously on this list! I've now managed to alienate both the consciousness doesn't really exist and the it exists and we can explain it factions. I did not mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness. It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines. Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this through surreptitious study of humans over a number of decades. Their models of human brain function are so good that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their environment they can predict their behaviour better than the humans can themselves. Now, I think you will agree (although Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what the experience is actually like. No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But this is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an excellent understanding of photons, we can not travel at the speed of light, or that although we may have an excellent understanding of trees, yet we can not photosynthesize. Neither of these problems seem particularly hard. But we can photosynthesize. And we can understand why we cannot travel at the speed of light. All this by using purely 3-person description of those phenomena in some theory. With consciousness, the range of the debate goes from non-existence to only-existing. The problem is that it seems that an entirely 3-person explanation of the brain-muscles relations evacuates any purpose for consciousness and the 1-person. That's not the case with photosynthesis. Bruno Jonathan Colvin http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 21-mai-05, à 15:48, Bruno Marchal a écrit : Le 21-mai-05, à 08:31, Jonathan Colvin a écrit : Stathis: People certainly seem to take their consciousness seriously on this list! I've now managed to alienate both the consciousness doesn't really exist and the it exists and we can explain it factions. I did not mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness. It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines. Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this through surreptitious study of humans over a number of decades. Their models of human brain function are so good that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their environment they can predict their behaviour better than the humans can themselves. Now, I think you will agree (although Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what the experience is actually like. No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But this is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an excellent understanding of photons, we can not travel at the speed of light, or that although we may have an excellent understanding of trees, yet we can not photosynthesize. Neither of these problems seem particularly hard. But we can photosynthesize. And we can understand why we cannot travel at the speed of light. All this by using purely 3-person description of those phenomena in some theory. With consciousness, the range of the debate goes from non-existence to only-existing. The problem is that it seems that an entirely 3-person explanation of the brain-muscles relations evacuates any purpose for consciousness and the 1-person. That's not the case with photosynthesis. ... and from this don't infer that I am saying that consciousness is not explainable. Just that consciousness cannot have the same *type* of explanation as photosynthesis. (With comp I would argue that an explanation of consciousness is of a type similar as an explanation of why there is something instead of just logic + arithmetic). Bruno Bruno Jonathan Colvin http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis writes I did not mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness. It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines. Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this through surreptitious study of humans over a number of decades. Their models of human brain function are so good that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their environment they can predict their behaviour better than the humans can themselves. Well put. An interesting point to add is that since human behavior is almost surely not compressible, the *only* way that they can learn what a human is going to do is to, in effect, run one (the mocked up one in their lab). As you say, they run an *emulation*. But this could mean that they had *no* special insight into consciousness, because by adjusting the teleporter, Scotty can find out things too just by making a physical copy of the Captain, and, for example, finding out what he'd say about giving the engineers a raise. But you have described Martian science very well. Here is what I think that they are capable of that *is* important: they could tell (or announce) with very high accuracy whether a species was conscious, and to what extent, in its natural environment, and do all this just from the creature's DNA (and perhaps a little info on the inter- uterine environment). Here is an analogy: in a cold hut in the Scottish highlands in 1440, two bright, but shivering, people are debating the nature of warmth. Says one: Brrr. Some day the scientists will be so advanced that the can objectively measure hotness, and you and I will more closely agree. And he turned out to be right, as we know now. Now, I think you will agree (although Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what the experience is actually like. Yes, but what does that mean? What does it mean for, say, you to know what it's like when I play 1. e4 in a game of chess? I can tell you that it's probably nothing at all like when *you* play 1. e4. But it's strickly a function of how similar our chess careers have been, whether we both have the same opinion of the Alapin counter to the Sicilian, and so forth. So in effect, it really comes down to how much you are already me when you play 1. e4. Somebody here said it much better than I: they said that you have to almost be someone to in order to know what it's like to be them. Jonathan then says No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But this is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an excellent understanding of photons, we can not travel at the speed of light, or that although we may have an excellent understanding of trees, yet we can not photosynthesize. Neither of these problems seem particularly hard. I totally agree. We are thus at an impasse, agreeing on all the facts but differing in our appraisal of the facts. Maybe. But since you (Stathis) write so well, could you summarize what your adversaries seem to be saying and what you say? I'm less sure (than you) that no progress can be made. thanks, Lee
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Bruno Marchal wrote: Stathis: People certainly seem to take their consciousness seriously on this list! I've now managed to alienate both the consciousness doesn't really exist and the it exists and we can explain it factions. I did not mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness. It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines. Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this through surreptitious study of humans over a number of decades. Their models of human brain function are so good that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their environment they can predict their behaviour better than the humans can themselves. Now, I think you will agree (although Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what the experience is actually like. No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But this is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an excellent understanding of photons, we can not travel at the speed of light, or that although we may have an excellent understanding of trees, yet we can not photosynthesize. Neither of these problems seem particularly hard. But we can photosynthesize. And we can understand why we cannot travel at the speed of light. All this by using purely 3-person description of those phenomena in some theory. With consciousness, the range of the debate goes from non-existence to only-existing. The problem is that it seems that an entirely 3-person explanation of the brain-muscles relations evacuates any purpose for consciousness and the 1-person. That's not the case with photosynthesis. To be more strictly analogous with the situation for consciousness, what Jonathan could have said is that we have no idea what it is like to *be* a photon or to *be* a tree photosynthesising. Most people would say that photons and trees aren't conscious, and therefore they *can* be entirely understood from a 3rd person perspective. Perhaps this is true, but it is not logically consistent to say that it must be true and still maintain the 1st person/ 3rd person distinction we have been discussing. This is because the whole point of the distinction is that it is not possible to deduce or understand that which is special about 1st person experience (namely, consciousness) from an entirely 3rd person perspective. The aliens I have described in my example could be as different from us as we are different from trees, and they could easily conclude that an emulation of our minds is not fundamentally different from an emulation of our weather. --Stathis Papaioannou _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 22-mai-05, à 06:29, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : Bruno Marchal wrote: Stathis: People certainly seem to take their consciousness seriously on this list! I've now managed to alienate both the consciousness doesn't really exist and the it exists and we can explain it factions. I did not mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness. It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines. Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this through surreptitious study of humans over a number of decades. Their models of human brain function are so good that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their environment they can predict their behaviour better than the humans can themselves. Now, I think you will agree (although Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what the experience is actually like. No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But this is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an excellent understanding of photons, we can not travel at the speed of light, or that although we may have an excellent understanding of trees, yet we can not photosynthesize. Neither of these problems seem particularly hard. But we can photosynthesize. And we can understand why we cannot travel at the speed of light. All this by using purely 3-person description of those phenomena in some theory. With consciousness, the range of the debate goes from non-existence to only-existing. The problem is that it seems that an entirely 3-person explanation of the brain-muscles relations evacuates any purpose for consciousness and the 1-person. That's not the case with photosynthesis. To be more strictly analogous with the situation for consciousness, what Jonathan could have said is that we have no idea what it is like to *be* a photon or to *be* a tree photosynthesising. Most people would say that photons and trees aren't conscious, and therefore they *can* be entirely understood from a 3rd person perspective. Perhaps this is true, but it is not logically consistent to say that it must be true and still maintain the 1st person/ 3rd person distinction we have been discussing. This is because the whole point of the distinction is that it is not possible to deduce or understand that which is special about 1st person experience (namely, consciousness) from an entirely 3rd person perspective. The aliens I have described in my example could be as different from us as we are different from trees, and they could easily conclude that an emulation of our minds is not fundamentally different from an emulation of our weather. Which means we agree completely. I thought Jonathan, in the manner of John Searle, was arguing that nothing in principle distinguishes a phenomenon like consciousness and photosynthesis. And this is just a traditional move made by the so-called elimininative materialists who just pretend consciousness (and first person) does not exist. The error they make, I think, comes from the fact that scientific discourses are (by construction) made only in the 3-person manner. But nothing prevents us to try (at least) to have some axiomatic of the first person discourse and to make some 3-person statements about it. And knowledge theory are like that. There is even a quasi-unanimity on the basic axiom of knowledge to know p entails p (Cp - p). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 20-mai-05, à 02:59, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : OK then, we agree! It's just that what I (and many others) refer to as qualia, you refer to as the difference between a description of a thing and being the thing. I hate the word dualism as much as you do (because of the implication that we may end up philosophically in the 16th century if we yield to it), but haven't you just defined a very fundamental kind of dualism, in aknowledging this difference between a thing and its description? It seems to me, in retrospect, that our whole argument has been one over semantics. Dennett (whom I greatly respect) goes to great lengths to avoid having impure thoughts about something being beyond empirical science or logic. David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind, 1996) accepts that it is actually simpler to admit that consciousness is just an irreducible part of physical existence. We accept that quarks, or bitstrings, or whatever are irreducible, so why is it any different to accept consciousness or what-it-is-like-to-be-something-as-distinct-from-a-description-of- something (which is more of a mouthful) on the same basis? Yes but then why not take everything for granted. I do think Chalmers just abandons rationalism, unlike Dennett in Brainstorms (but then a little bit too in Consciousness explained ... explained away as he realises himself at the end of the book (at last). Frankly Stathis, is that is your last move, I prefer the short answer by Norman Samish's wife: because. ;) Bruno --Stathis Papaioannou [quoting Stathis] My curiosity could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I became one with the new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't think you can deny it. I can deny that there is anything special about it, beyond the difference between A): *a description of an apple*; and B): *an apple*. I don't think anyone would deny that there is a difference between A and B (even with comp there is still a difference); but this essential difference does not seem to have anything in particular to do with qualia or experience. Jonathan Colvin Stathis: Can the description of the apple, or bat, or whatever meaningfully include what it is like to be that thing? My argument (which is Dennet's argument) is that what it is like to be that thing is identical to being that thing. As Bruno points out, in 3rd person level (ie. the level where I am describing or simulating an apple), a description can not be a thing; but on the 1st person level (where a description *is* the thing, from the point of view of the thing, inside the simulation, as it were), then the description does include what it is like to be that thing. But include is not the correct word to use, since it subtly assumes a dualism (that the qualia exist somehow separate from the mere description of the thing); the description *just is* the thing. Jonathan _ MSN Messenger v7. Download now: http://messenger.ninemsn.com.au/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Russell Standish wrote: On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 07:29:33AM -0700, James N Rose wrote: I would like to gather everyone's attention to point to an essential conceptual error that exists in the current debating points of this topic, which in fact has been an egregious error in logic for the past 2500 years, ever since Plato. . . . . . . . . . 'color' - that which we first-order associate -with- apple, exists -solely- in that region -outside and beyond- ... where 'apple' does not exist. By sheer rigid definition of 'existence' - and logical definitions re 'sets' - apple and 'color' are and always must be -mutually exclusive-, with no Venn intersection at all. Conclusions: 1. No entity is 'complete' in and of itself; entities are completed only in co-presence of external environmentals. 2. Systems and entities -will have- qualia that exist (emergently) from I-Thou relations which they may not be internally aware of, or be self appreciative of, nor the impacts of these qualia on their 'self'. First and Third frames of reference can never be identical, and 'exhibition of qualia' versus 'access to qualia for feedback purposes' are quite different things. Cybernetic secondary connections 'smooth' and blur this relationship of being. (there is more, but I don't have time at the moment to continue; sorry to do a 'fermat', but I'll write again, if anyone cares to explore this thread after this posting today) Jamie Rose 19 May 2005 Agreed that colour is not a characteristic of an object in itself. How does this impact on the debate, however? Russell, Realize first that you just easily and aggreably opted to completely negate Platonic 'real v. ideal' as a flawed logic. Identification of 'essential qualia' is no longer an a priori valid 'given'. By next logical extension of this de-validation, which qualia - assigned to an entity by way of external evaluation of the entity - represent qualia which the entity functions on immediately and intimately because the entity internally has an information link to it? The school prank of putting a secretly taped sign on a friends back saying 'kick me' .. the conscious performance of the student -excludes- a qualia which the environmental world identifies -with- the student-with-sign. A description of a system, and a system in and of itself, can never and will never map perfectly one to one and on to. QED Conclusions: 1. Initial condition alternatives result in alternate eventstream outcomes. 2. Alternate information sets preclude precision cloning, performances, decision gates. 3. Conscious is not perfectly transferrable. Jamie
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 20-mai-05, à 02:59, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : OK then, we agree! It's just that what I (and many others) refer to as qualia, you refer to as the difference between a description of a thing and being the thing. I hate the word dualism as much as you do (because of the implication that we may end up philosophically in the 16th century if we yield to it), but haven't you just defined a very fundamental kind of dualism, in aknowledging this difference between a thing and its description? It seems to me, in retrospect, that our whole argument has been one over semantics. Dennett (whom I greatly respect) goes to great lengths to avoid having impure thoughts about something being beyond empirical science or logic. David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind, 1996) accepts that it is actually simpler to admit that consciousness is just an irreducible part of physical existence. We accept that quarks, or bitstrings, or whatever are irreducible, so why is it any different to accept consciousness or what-it-is-like-to-be-something-as-distinct-from-a-description-of- something (which is more of a mouthful) on the same basis? Yes but then why not take everything for granted. I do think Chalmers just abandons rationalism, unlike Dennett in Brainstorms (but then a little bit too in Consciousness explained ... explained away as he realises himself at the end of the book (at last). Frankly Stathis, is that is your last move, I prefer the short answer by Norman Samish's wife: because. ;) Bruno People certainly seem to take their consciousness seriously on this list! I've now managed to alienate both the consciousness doesn't really exist and the it exists and we can explain it factions. I did not mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness. It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines. Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this through surreptitious study of humans over a number of decades. Their models of human brain function are so good that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their environment they can predict their behaviour better than the humans can themselves. Now, I think you will agree (although Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what the experience is actually like. For example, if they lack any sense of vision, they cannot possibly know what it is like to see red. This is the difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. At this point, Bruno, you may go further and say that the 1st/3rd person difference is not irreducible or inexplicable, but can be shown to be a theorem in mathematical logic. This is a spectacular result, and it is at a deeper explanatory level than the description of the neural or computational basis of 1st person experience. However, does it help our blind aliens understand what it is like for a human to see red? It is that aspect of 1st person experience which cannot possibly be understood or communicated in any way other than through oneself *being* the system that has the experience which Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Jonathan Colvin wrote: [quoting Stathis] My curiosity could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I became one with the new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't think you can deny it. I can deny that there is anything special about it, beyond the difference between A): *a description of an apple*; and B): *an apple*. I don't think anyone would deny that there is a difference between A and B (even with comp there is still a difference); but this essential difference does not seem to have anything in particular to do with qualia or experience. Jonathan Colvin Can the description of the apple, or bat, or whatever meaningfully include what it is like to be that thing? --Stathis Papaioannou _ Sell your car for $9 on carpoint.com.au http://www.carpoint.com.au/sellyourcar
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 19-mai-05, à 14:44, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : Jonathan Colvin wrote: [quoting Stathis] My curiosity could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I became one with the new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't think you can deny it. I can deny that there is anything special about it, beyond the difference between A): *a description of an apple*; and B): *an apple*. I don't think anyone would deny that there is a difference between A and B (even with comp there is still a difference); but this essential difference does not seem to have anything in particular to do with qualia or experience. Jonathan Colvin Can the description of the apple, or bat, or whatever meaningfully include what it is like to be that thing? What do you mean by include ? Does the artificial brain proposed by your doctor includes you ? In a 1-person sense: yes (assuming c.) In a 3-person sense: no. OK? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
I would like to gather everyone's attention to point to an essential conceptual error that exists in the current debating points of this topic, which in fact has been an egregious error in logic for the past 2500 years, ever since Plato. Recent postings cite: Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Jonathan Colvin wrote: [quoting Stathis] My curiosity could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I became one with the new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't think you can deny it. I can deny that there is anything special about it, beyond the difference between A): *a description of an apple*; and B): *an apple*. I don't think anyone would deny that there is a difference between A and B (even with comp there is still a difference); but this essential difference does not seem to have anything in particular to do with qualia or experience. Jonathan Colvin Can the description of the apple, or bat, or whatever meaningfully include what it is like to be that thing? --Stathis Papaioannou In 1996 at Towards a Science of Consciousness (Tucson) I presented several exhibits, each one highlighting some specific relational qualia of existence in isolation, and identifying each/all in reagrd to a potential single holistic description of being -and- performances of being. The one that has bearing here, was simply an apple - inside a black box which no light could enter, until the box was opened and photons could reach the surface of the apple. The discussion point went something like this: In contradistinction to the 2500 years old 'definition' of self and completeness set forth by Plato in his discussions of 'real' vis a vis 'ideal', notice is heregiven that the apple inside the closed box is - ideally - an entity which is without color ... absolutely and always - even though weak-logic presumes and assigns color 'to' things and entities, de facto. The full existential extent and outer-bound limit of the apple goes -only- up to BUT NOT BEYOND its physical manifestation; in this case in entity: its skin. Where skin -ends-, apple .. -ends- and does not 'exist'. However, 'color' - that which we first-order associate -with- apple, exists -solely- in that region -outside and beyond- ... where 'apple' does not exist. By sheer rigid definition of 'existence' - and logical definitions re 'sets' - apple and 'color' are and always must be -mutually exclusive-, with no Venn intersection at all. Conclusions: 1. No entity is 'complete' in and of itself; entities are completed only in co-presence of external environmentals. 2. Systems and entities -will have- qualia that exist (emergently) from I-Thou relations which they may not be internally aware of, or be self appreciative of, nor the impacts of these qualia on their 'self'. First and Third frames of reference can never be identical, and 'exhibition of qualia' versus 'access to qualia for feedback purposes' are quite different things. Cybernetic secondary connections 'smooth' and blur this relationship of being. (there is more, but I don't have time at the moment to continue; sorry to do a 'fermat', but I'll write again, if anyone cares to explore this thread after this posting today) Jamie Rose 19 May 2005
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
[quoting Stathis] My curiosity could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I became one with the new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't think you can deny it. I can deny that there is anything special about it, beyond the difference between A): *a description of an apple*; and B): *an apple*. I don't think anyone would deny that there is a difference between A and B (even with comp there is still a difference); but this essential difference does not seem to have anything in particular to do with qualia or experience. Jonathan Colvin Stathis: Can the description of the apple, or bat, or whatever meaningfully include what it is like to be that thing? My argument (which is Dennet's argument) is that what it is like to be that thing is identical to being that thing. As Bruno points out, in 3rd person level (ie. the level where I am describing or simulating an apple), a description can not be a thing; but on the 1st person level (where a description *is* the thing, from the point of view of the thing, inside the simulation, as it were), then the description does include what it is like to be that thing. But include is not the correct word to use, since it subtly assumes a dualism (that the qualia exist somehow separate from the mere description of the thing); the description *just is* the thing. Jonathan
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
OK then, we agree! It's just that what I (and many others) refer to as qualia, you refer to as the difference between a description of a thing and being the thing. I hate the word dualism as much as you do (because of the implication that we may end up philosophically in the 16th century if we yield to it), but haven't you just defined a very fundamental kind of dualism, in aknowledging this difference between a thing and its description? It seems to me, in retrospect, that our whole argument has been one over semantics. Dennett (whom I greatly respect) goes to great lengths to avoid having impure thoughts about something being beyond empirical science or logic. David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind, 1996) accepts that it is actually simpler to admit that consciousness is just an irreducible part of physical existence. We accept that quarks, or bitstrings, or whatever are irreducible, so why is it any different to accept consciousness or what-it-is-like-to-be-something-as-distinct-from-a-description-of-something (which is more of a mouthful) on the same basis? --Stathis Papaioannou [quoting Stathis] My curiosity could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I became one with the new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't think you can deny it. I can deny that there is anything special about it, beyond the difference between A): *a description of an apple*; and B): *an apple*. I don't think anyone would deny that there is a difference between A and B (even with comp there is still a difference); but this essential difference does not seem to have anything in particular to do with qualia or experience. Jonathan Colvin Stathis: Can the description of the apple, or bat, or whatever meaningfully include what it is like to be that thing? My argument (which is Dennet's argument) is that what it is like to be that thing is identical to being that thing. As Bruno points out, in 3rd person level (ie. the level where I am describing or simulating an apple), a description can not be a thing; but on the 1st person level (where a description *is* the thing, from the point of view of the thing, inside the simulation, as it were), then the description does include what it is like to be that thing. But include is not the correct word to use, since it subtly assumes a dualism (that the qualia exist somehow separate from the mere description of the thing); the description *just is* the thing. Jonathan _ MSN Messenger v7. Download now: http://messenger.ninemsn.com.au/
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Dear Jonathan, Non-separateness and identity are not the same! Your argument against dualism assumes that the duals are somehow separable and thus, lacking a linking mechanism, fails as a viable theory. On the other hand, once we see the flaw in the assumption that we are making, that Body and Mind - Physical existence and Mathematical existence (or Information!) are not separable in the sense that one can have meaning and reason to be without the other, we can again consider how dualism can be viable as people such as Vaughan Pratt have done. The hard part is in overcoming the prejudice that has built up since Descartes flawed theory was proposed. His failure was in assuming that Body and Mind are substances that have independent yet equal existence. The use of the assumption of substance caries with it the necessitation of a causal connector. When we consider the duality in terms of process or types and tokens or hardware and software, it makes a lot more sense. This is analogous to claiming that numbers can somehow exist without there being any need for them to be representable in any way. Unless we can somehow read each other's minds, it is impossible for me to communicate the difference between the number 1 and the number 2. Without some physical structure to act as an interface between our Minds, minds can not interact or even know anything; there is no definiteness. Similarly, Bodies can not ask questions or predictions or have anticipations or self-representations without some Mind associated. Nature has given us fingers with which to understand numbers... Consciousness seems to be more of a functional relationship between the Physical and the Mental, the Outside and the Inside, as Chalmer's states. When the two dual aspects are taken to the ultimate level of Existence in-itself, the distinction between the two vanishes. Russell saw this long ago, he denoted it as neutral monism. It is too bad that he made the mistake of excluding non-well founded sets from consideration. Stephen - Original Message - From: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 6:22 PM Subject: RE: What do you lose if you simply accept... snip Stathis: Can the description of the apple, or bat, or whatever meaningfully include what it is like to be that thing? My argument (which is Dennet's argument) is that what it is like to be that thing is identical to being that thing. As Bruno points out, in 3rd person level (ie. the level where I am describing or simulating an apple), a description can not be a thing; but on the 1st person level (where a description *is* the thing, from the point of view of the thing, inside the simulation, as it were), then the description does include what it is like to be that thing. But include is not the correct word to use, since it subtly assumes a dualism (that the qualia exist somehow separate from the mere description of the thing); the description *just is* the thing. Jonathan
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 07:29:33AM -0700, James N Rose wrote: I would like to gather everyone's attention to point to an essential conceptual error that exists in the current debating points of this topic, which in fact has been an egregious error in logic for the past 2500 years, ever since Plato. ... In 1996 at Towards a Science of Consciousness (Tucson) I presented several exhibits, each one highlighting some specific relational qualia of existence in isolation, and identifying each/all in reagrd to a potential single holistic description of being -and- performances of being. The one that has bearing here, was simply an apple - inside a black box which no light could enter, until the box was opened and photons could reach the surface of the apple. The discussion point went something like this: In contradistinction to the 2500 years old 'definition' of self and completeness set forth by Plato in his discussions of 'real' vis a vis 'ideal', notice is heregiven that the apple inside the closed box is - ideally - an entity which is without color ... absolutely and always - even though weak-logic presumes and assigns color 'to' things and entities, de facto. The full existential extent and outer-bound limit of the apple goes -only- up to BUT NOT BEYOND its physical manifestation; in this case in entity: its skin. Where skin -ends-, apple .. -ends- and does not 'exist'. However, 'color' - that which we first-order associate -with- apple, exists -solely- in that region -outside and beyond- ... where 'apple' does not exist. By sheer rigid definition of 'existence' - and logical definitions re 'sets' - apple and 'color' are and always must be -mutually exclusive-, with no Venn intersection at all. Conclusions: 1. No entity is 'complete' in and of itself; entities are completed only in co-presence of external environmentals. 2. Systems and entities -will have- qualia that exist (emergently) from I-Thou relations which they may not be internally aware of, or be self appreciative of, nor the impacts of these qualia on their 'self'. First and Third frames of reference can never be identical, and 'exhibition of qualia' versus 'access to qualia for feedback purposes' are quite different things. Cybernetic secondary connections 'smooth' and blur this relationship of being. (there is more, but I don't have time at the moment to continue; sorry to do a 'fermat', but I'll write again, if anyone cares to explore this thread after this posting today) Jamie Rose 19 May 2005 Agreed that colour is not a characteristic of an object in itself. How does this impact on the debate, however? -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 pgpMcqeRxZUqL.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Yes, this is what I meant. What it is like to be something can only be answered from the 1st person perspective. --Stathis Can the description of the apple, or bat, or whatever meaningfully include what it is like to be that thing? What do you mean by include ? Does the artificial brain proposed by your doctor includes you ? In a 1-person sense: yes (assuming c.) In a 3-person sense: no. OK? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis: OK then, we agree! It's just that what I (and many others) refer to as qualia, you refer to as the difference between a description of a thing and being the thing. I hate the word dualism as much as you do (because of the implication that we may end up philosophically in the 16th century if we yield to it), but haven't you just defined a very fundamental kind of dualism, in aknowledging this difference between a thing and its description? It seems to me, in retrospect, that our whole argument has been one over semantics. Well, that would be a novel application of dualism, I think. A description of a thing, and *a thing* seem to be two very different categories; dualism would usually imply one is talking about dualistic properties of the *same thing*. I'm still inclined to deny that qualia refers to anything. It is a mental fiction. Dennett (whom I greatly respect) goes to great lengths to avoid having impure thoughts about something being beyond empirical science or logic. David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind, 1996) accepts that it is actually simpler to admit that consciousness is just an irreducible part of physical existence. We accept that quarks, or bitstrings, or whatever are irreducible, so why is it any different to accept consciousness or what-it-is-like-to-be-something-as-distinct-from-a-description -of-something (which is more of a mouthful) on the same basis? The argument from Dennet (which I'm inclinced to agree with) would be that we can not accept what-is-it-likeness as an irreducible thing because there is no such thing as what is it likeness. Jonathan Colvin --Stathis Papaioannou [quoting Stathis] My curiosity could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I became one with the new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't think you can deny it. I can deny that there is anything special about it, beyond the difference between A): *a description of an apple*; and B): *an apple*. I don't think anyone would deny that there is a difference between A and B (even with comp there is still a difference); but this essential difference does not seem to have anything in particular to do with qualia or experience. Jonathan Colvin Stathis: Can the description of the apple, or bat, or whatever meaningfully include what it is like to be that thing? My argument (which is Dennet's argument) is that what it is like to be that thing is identical to being that thing. As Bruno points out, in 3rd person level (ie. the level where I am describing or simulating an apple), a description can not be a thing; but on the 1st person level (where a description *is* the thing, from the point of view of the thing, inside the simulation, as it were), then the description does include what it is like to be that thing. But include is not the correct word to use, since it subtly assumes a dualism (that the qualia exist somehow separate from the mere description of the thing); the description *just is* the thing. Jonathan _ MSN Messenger v7. Download now: http://messenger.ninemsn.com.au/
Fw: What do you lose if you simply accept...
- Original Message - From: Stephen Paul King [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 10:23 PM Subject: Re: What do you lose if you simply accept... Dear Jonathan, A mental fiction indeed, but one that we can not just imagine away. ;-) Stephen - Original Message - From: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 10:19 PM Subject: RE: What do you lose if you simply accept... Stathis: OK then, we agree! It's just that what I (and many others) refer to as qualia, you refer to as the difference between a description of a thing and being the thing. I hate the word dualism as much as you do (because of the implication that we may end up philosophically in the 16th century if we yield to it), but haven't you just defined a very fundamental kind of dualism, in aknowledging this difference between a thing and its description? It seems to me, in retrospect, that our whole argument has been one over semantics. Well, that would be a novel application of dualism, I think. A description of a thing, and *a thing* seem to be two very different categories; dualism would usually imply one is talking about dualistic properties of the *same thing*. I'm still inclined to deny that qualia refers to anything. It is a mental fiction. Dennett (whom I greatly respect) goes to great lengths to avoid having impure thoughts about something being beyond empirical science or logic. David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind, 1996) accepts that it is actually simpler to admit that consciousness is just an irreducible part of physical existence. We accept that quarks, or bitstrings, or whatever are irreducible, so why is it any different to accept consciousness or what-it-is-like-to-be-something-as-distinct-from-a-description -of-something (which is more of a mouthful) on the same basis? The argument from Dennet (which I'm inclinced to agree with) would be that we can not accept what-is-it-likeness as an irreducible thing because there is no such thing as what is it likeness. Jonathan Colvin --Stathis Papaioannou [quoting Stathis] My curiosity could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I became one with the new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't think you can deny it. I can deny that there is anything special about it, beyond the difference between A): *a description of an apple*; and B): *an apple*. I don't think anyone would deny that there is a difference between A and B (even with comp there is still a difference); but this essential difference does not seem to have anything in particular to do with qualia or experience. Jonathan Colvin Stathis: Can the description of the apple, or bat, or whatever meaningfully include what it is like to be that thing? My argument (which is Dennet's argument) is that what it is like to be that thing is identical to being that thing. As Bruno points out, in 3rd person level (ie. the level where I am describing or simulating an apple), a description can not be a thing; but on the 1st person level (where a description *is* the thing, from the point of view of the thing, inside the simulation, as it were), then the description does include what it is like to be that thing. But include is not the correct word to use, since it subtly assumes a dualism (that the qualia exist somehow separate from the mere description of the thing); the description *just is* the thing. Jonathan _ MSN Messenger v7. Download now: http://messenger.ninemsn.com.au/
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
This fits in well: the philosopher of consciousness and mathematician, David Chalmers, coined the phrase: Experience is information from the inside; Physics is information from the outside. Which I quite like. It's in his book The Conscious Mind: towards a fundamental theory which is heavy going, but seems to have some really good ideas. okidokee, tim On May 18, 2005, at 8:26 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I was using the term information loosely, to include what is commonly termed qualia, subjective experience etc. I agree that if a physical system is fully specified, then that is all you need in order to duplicate or emulate the system. The new system will do everything the original one did, including have conscious experiences. It's worth stressing this point again: you don't need any special, non-physical information to emulate or duplicate a conscious system; you don't need God to provide it with a soul, you don't need to purchase a mind-body interface kit, you don't need to meditate and wave quartz crystals around, and you don't need to have 1st person knowledge of its subjective experiences. All you need is a few kilograms of raw materials, a molecular assembler mechanism, and the data which indicates where each bit goes. Once the job is finished, you automatically have a system which talks, eats, and is conscious. Psychology and biology have been reduced to physics and chemistry. Consciousness has been shown to be just be an emergent phenomenon in a particular type of biological computer. Agree so far? OK: having said all that, and assuming at this point that we know the position and function of every atom in this newly created system, I *still* would wonder what it feels like to actually *be* this system. My curiosity could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I became one with the new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't think you can deny it. --Stathis Papaioannou From Lee Corbin: Jonathan contrasts descriptions and what the descriptions describe: Stathis: Your post suggests to me a neat way to define what is special about first person experience: it is the gap in information between what can be known from a description of an object and what can be known from being the object itself. But how can being an object provide any extra information? I don't see that information or knowledge has much to do with it. How can being an apple provide any extra information about the apple? Let's remember some naive answers here. First, for a fixed physical object, there exist infinitely many descriptions. It's a common belief that beyond a certain amount of accuracy, differences don't really matter. For example, one ought to be quite happy to teleport even if there is one atomic error for every 10^20 atoms. Second, a common interpretation of QM asserts that beyond a certain accuracy, there is *no* additional information to be had whatsoever. That is, that there exists some finite bit string that contains *all* an object's information (cf. Bekenstein bound). Still, the naive answer is that a description (or even a set of descriptions) of a physical object is different from the physical object itself: a physical object is a process, and a set of descriptions is merely a set of bits frozen in time (and here we are back again, you know where). However, I hold with these naive answers, as do a lot of people. And so therefore I proceed to answer the above question thusly: Being an apple provides *no* information beyond that which would be provided by a sufficiently rich description. Even if an emulation of a person appreciating the sublime, or agonizing to a truly horrific extent, or whateverno information obtains anywhere that is not in principle available to the experimenters, i.e., available from the third-person. You could make the experimenter *hurt*, and then say, now you know what it feels like, and given today's techniques, that might very well be true. But this is only a limitation on what is known and knowable today; it says nothing about what might be knowable about a human subject of 20th century complexity to entities living a thousand years from now. (We ignore the possible effects on the experimenter's value system, or possible effects on his incentives: we are just talking about information as bit-strings, here.) Obviously there is a difference between *an apple* and *a description of an apple*, in the same way there is a difference between *a person* and *a description of a person*, but the difference is one of physical existence, not information. Yeah, that's the way it seems to me too. Lee
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis writes I was using the term information loosely, to include what is commonly termed qualia, subjective experience etc. I agree that if a physical system is fully specified, then that is all you need in order to duplicate or emulate the system. The new system will do everything the original one did, including have conscious experiences. It's worth stressing this point again: you don't need any special, non-physical information to emulate or duplicate a conscious system; you don't need God to provide it with a soul, you don't need to purchase a mind-body interface kit, you don't need to meditate and wave quartz crystals around, and you don't need to have 1st person knowledge of its subjective experiences. All you need is a few kilograms of raw materials, a molecular assembler mechanism, and the data which indicates where each bit goes. Once the job is finished, you automatically have a system which talks, eats, and is conscious. Psychology and biology have been reduced to physics and chemistry. Consciousness has been shown to be just be an emergent phenomenon in a particular type of biological computer. Agree so far? Well, this is certainly all right by me---though hardly by everyone here. You have described very well the ordinary reduction of humans and animals to ordinary physical mechanisms, a view that was widespread among materialists all through the 19th and 20th centuries, even if they didn't have as much evidence as we do. OK: having said all that, and assuming at this point that we know the position and function of every atom in this newly created system, I *still* would wonder what it feels like to actually *be* this system. Have you read Hofstadter's comments on Thomas Nagel's essay What is it Like to be a Bat?. (Most easily accessed in The Mind's I by Hofstadter and Dennett.) And I presume that you're familiar with Daniel Dennett's views on qualia, as in Consciousness Explained, but that you reject them? (I'm rather new to this list.) Lee
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Lee: how would you relate to my generalization of the (non Shannon) information concept: Acknowledged difference where the acknowledgor is not specified nor is the nature of the difference ? (just 'deifferenc' is no information, unless absorbed into a pool of organized data, identity does not constitute information - unless compared with not-identity, to which it IS a difference.) It can range from a differential el. charge to a Shakespeare story. Cheers John M - Original Message - From: Lee Corbin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: EverythingList everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 3:07 AM Subject: RE: What do you lose if you simply accept... Stathis writes I was using the term information loosely, to include what is commonly termed qualia, subjective experience etc. I agree that if a physical system is fully specified, then that is all you need in order to duplicate or emulate the system. The new system will do everything the original one did, including have conscious experiences. It's worth stressing this point again: you don't need any special, non-physical information to emulate or duplicate a conscious system; you don't need God to provide it with a soul, you don't need to purchase a mind-body interface kit, you don't need to meditate and wave quartz crystals around, and you don't need to have 1st person knowledge of its subjective experiences. All you need is a few kilograms of raw materials, a molecular assembler mechanism, and the data which indicates where each bit goes. Once the job is finished, you automatically have a system which talks, eats, and is conscious. Psychology and biology have been reduced to physics and chemistry. Consciousness has been shown to be just be an emergent phenomenon in a particular type of biological computer. Agree so far? Well, this is certainly all right by me---though hardly by everyone here. You have described very well the ordinary reduction of humans and animals to ordinary physical mechanisms, a view that was widespread among materialists all through the 19th and 20th centuries, even if they didn't have as much evidence as we do. OK: having said all that, and assuming at this point that we know the position and function of every atom in this newly created system, I *still* would wonder what it feels like to actually *be* this system. Have you read Hofstadter's comments on Thomas Nagel's essay What is it Like to be a Bat?. (Most easily accessed in The Mind's I by Hofstadter and Dennett.) And I presume that you're familiar with Daniel Dennett's views on qualia, as in Consciousness Explained, but that you reject them? (I'm rather new to this list.) Lee
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis: I agree with Lee's and Jonathan's comments, except that I think there is something unusual about first person experience/ qualia/ consciousness in that there is an aspect that cannot be communicated unless you experience it (a blind man cannot know what it is like to see, no matter how much he learns about the process of vision). Let me use the analogy of billiard balls and Newtonian mechanics. Everything that billiard balls do by themselves and with each other can be fully explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, it can all be modelled by a computer program. But in addition, there is the state of being-a-billiard-ball, which is something very strange and cannot be communicated to non-billiard balls, because it makes absolutely no difference to what is observed about them. It is not clear if this aspect of billiard ball experience is duplicated by the computer program, precisely because it makes no observable difference: you have to be the simulated billiard ball to know. But is this state of being a billiard ball any different than simple existence? What in particular is unusual about first person qualia? We might simply say that a *description* of a billiard ball is not the same as *a billiard ball* (a description of a billiard ball can not bruise me like a real one can); in the same way, a description of a mind is not the same as a mind; but what is unusual about that? It is not strange to differentiate between a real object and a description of such, so I don't see that there is anything any more unusual about first person experience. Is it any stranger that a blind man can not see, than that a description of a billiard ball's properties (weight, diameter, colour etc) can not bruise me? Jonathan Colvin You don't need to postulate a special mechanism whereby mind interacts with matter. The laws of physics explain the workings of the brain, and conscious experience is just the strange, irreducible effect of this as seen from the inside. --Stathis Papaioannou Lee corbin wrote: Pratt's disdain follows from the obvious failures of other models. It does not take a logician or mathematician or philosopher of unbelievable IQ to see that the models of monism that have been advanced have a fatal flaw: the inability to prove the necessity of epiphenomena. Maybe Bruno's theory will solve this, I hold out hope that it does; but meanwhile, why can't we consider and debate alternatives that offer a view ranging explanations and unifying threads, such as Pratt's Chu space idea? I just have to say that I have utterly no sense that anything here needs explanation. I have to agree. Perhaps it is because I'm a Denett devotee, brainwashed into a full denial of qualia/dualism, but I've yet to see any coherent argument as to what there is anything about consciousness that needs explaining. The only importance I see for consciousness is its role in self-selection per Bostrom. Jonathan Colvin _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 17-mai-05, à 09:06, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : I agree with Lee's and Jonathan's comments, except that I think there is something unusual about first person experience/ qualia/ consciousness in that there is an aspect that cannot be communicated unless you experience it (a blind man cannot know what it is like to see, no matter how much he learns about the process of vision). Let me use the analogy of billiard balls and Newtonian mechanics. Everything that billiard balls do by themselves and with each other can be fully explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, it can all be modelled by a computer program. But in addition, there is the state of being-a-billiard-ball, which is something very strange and cannot be communicated to non-billiard balls, because it makes absolutely no difference to what is observed about them. It is not clear if this aspect of billiard ball experience is duplicated by the computer program, precisely because it makes no observable difference: you have to be the simulated billiard ball to know. Before someone says that billiard balls are not complex enough to have an internal life, I would point out that neither is there any way to deduce a priori that humans have conscious experiences. You have to actually be a human to know this. You don't need to postulate a special mechanism whereby mind interacts with matter. The laws of physics explain the workings of the brain, and conscious experience is just the strange, irreducible effect of this as seen from the inside. I agree. Let me make a little try to explain briefly why I think that, although the first person cannot be reduced to any pure third person notion, yet, it is possible to explain in a third person way why the first person exists and why it cannot be reduced to any pure third person way. I will consider a machine M. The machine is supposed to be a sort of mathematician, or a theorem proving machine in arithmetic. I suppose the machine is sound: this means that if the machine proves some proposition p, then p is true. I will also suppose that the machine is programmed so as to assert all the propositions she can prove, in some order. So one day she proves 1+1=2. Another day she proves 17 is prime, and so on. So I will use M proves and M can prove equivalently. As everyone knows or should know since Goedel 1931, it is possible to represent the *provability by the machine M* in the language of the machine (here the language is first order arithmetic, but the detail are irrelevant in this short explanation). I will write Bp for BEW(GN(p)), which is the representation of M proves p in the language of the machine. BEW(GN(p)), means really there is a number which codes a proof of the formula itself coded by GN(p). GN(p) is for the Godel number of p, which is the traditional encoding of p in arithmetic. BEW is for beweisbar: provable in German. It has been proved by Hilbert, Bernays and Loeb that such a machine verifies the following condition, for any p representing an arithmetical proposition: 1) If M proves p then M proves Bp (sort of introspective ability: if the machine can prove p, the machine can prove that the machine can prove p) 2) M proves (Bp B(p-q)) - Bq (the machine can prove that if she proves p and if she proves p-q, then she will proves p). This means that the machine can prove that she follows the modus ponens inference rule (which is part of arithmetic). It is a second introspective ability. 3) The machine M proves 1), i.e. M proves Bp - BBp. i.e. the machine proves that if she proves p, then she can prove that she can prove p. If the machine is sound, the machine is necessarily consistent. That means the machine will not prove 1 + 1 = 3, or any false arithmetical statement. To make things easier, I suppose there is a constant false in the machine language, written f. I could have use the proposition 1+1=3 instead, but f is shorter. So M is consistent is equivalent as saying that (NOT Bf) is true about M, i.e. when B is the provability of the machine (as I will no more repeat). Goedel second incompleteness theorem asserts that if M is consistent then M cannot prove M is consistent. This can be translate in the language of M: (NOT Bf) - (NOT B (NOT Bf)). We have two things: (NOT Bf) - (NOT B (NOT Bf)) is true *about* the machine, but we have also that the machine is able to prove it about itself: that (NOT Bf) - (NOT B (NOT Bf)) is can be proved by the machine. Of course from this you know that (NOT Bf) is true about the machine, but that the machine cannot prove it. I hope you are able to verify if a proposition of classical propositional logic is a tautology or not. In particular NOT A is has the same truth value that A - f. In particular consistency (NOT Bf) is equivalent to (Bf - f). So if he machine is sound, and thus consistent, (Bf - f) is true about the machine, but cannot be proved by the machine. We see
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 17-mai-05, à 09:56, Jonathan Colvin a écrit : Is it any stranger that a blind man can not see, than that a description of a billiard ball's properties (weight, diameter, colour etc) can not bruise me? It is different with comp. because a description of you + a description of billiard ball, done at some right level, can bruise you. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Jonathan, Your post suggests to me a neat way to define what is special about first person experience: it is the gap in information between what can be known from a description of an object and what can be known from being the object itself. This is a personal thing, but I think it is at least a little surprising that there should be such a gap, and would never have guessed had I not been conscious myself. I don't think it is a good idea to simply ignore this gap, but on the other hand, I don't think there is any need to postulate mind/body dualism and try to explain how the two interact. Aside from this one difference I have focussed on, first person experience is just something that occurs in the normal course of events in the physical universe. --Stathis Papaioannou Stathis: I agree with Lee's and Jonathan's comments, except that I think there is something unusual about first person experience/ qualia/ consciousness in that there is an aspect that cannot be communicated unless you experience it (a blind man cannot know what it is like to see, no matter how much he learns about the process of vision). Let me use the analogy of billiard balls and Newtonian mechanics. Everything that billiard balls do by themselves and with each other can be fully explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, it can all be modelled by a computer program. But in addition, there is the state of being-a-billiard-ball, which is something very strange and cannot be communicated to non-billiard balls, because it makes absolutely no difference to what is observed about them. It is not clear if this aspect of billiard ball experience is duplicated by the computer program, precisely because it makes no observable difference: you have to be the simulated billiard ball to know. But is this state of being a billiard ball any different than simple existence? What in particular is unusual about first person qualia? We might simply say that a *description* of a billiard ball is not the same as *a billiard ball* (a description of a billiard ball can not bruise me like a real one can); in the same way, a description of a mind is not the same as a mind; but what is unusual about that? It is not strange to differentiate between a real object and a description of such, so I don't see that there is anything any more unusual about first person experience. Is it any stranger that a blind man can not see, than that a description of a billiard ball's properties (weight, diameter, colour etc) can not bruise me? Jonathan Colvin You don't need to postulate a special mechanism whereby mind interacts with matter. The laws of physics explain the workings of the brain, and conscious experience is just the strange, irreducible effect of this as seen from the inside. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Are you right for each other? Find out with our Love Calculator: http://fun.mobiledownloads.com.au/191191/index.wl?page=templategroupName=funstuff
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis: Your post suggests to me a neat way to define what is special about first person experience: it is the gap in information between what can be known from a description of an object and what can be known from being the object itself. But how can being an object provide any extra information? I don't see that information or knowledge has much to do with it. How can being an apple provide any extra information about the apple? Obviously there is a difference between *an apple* and *a description of an apple*, in the same way there is a difference between *a person* and *a description of a person*, but the difference is one of physical existence, not information. Jonathan Colvin
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Jonathan contrasts descriptions and what the descriptions describe: Stathis: Your post suggests to me a neat way to define what is special about first person experience: it is the gap in information between what can be known from a description of an object and what can be known from being the object itself. But how can being an object provide any extra information? I don't see that information or knowledge has much to do with it. How can being an apple provide any extra information about the apple? Let's remember some naive answers here. First, for a fixed physical object, there exist infinitely many descriptions. It's a common belief that beyond a certain amount of accuracy, differences don't really matter. For example, one ought to be quite happy to teleport even if there is one atomic error for every 10^20 atoms. Second, a common interpretation of QM asserts that beyond a certain accuracy, there is *no* additional information to be had whatsoever. That is, that there exists some finite bit string that contains *all* an object's information (cf. Bekenstein bound). Still, the naive answer is that a description (or even a set of descriptions) of a physical object is different from the physical object itself: a physical object is a process, and a set of descriptions is merely a set of bits frozen in time (and here we are back again, you know where). However, I hold with these naive answers, as do a lot of people. And so therefore I proceed to answer the above question thusly: Being an apple provides *no* information beyond that which would be provided by a sufficiently rich description. Even if an emulation of a person appreciating the sublime, or agonizing to a truly horrific extent, or whateverno information obtains anywhere that is not in principle available to the experimenters, i.e., available from the third-person. You could make the experimenter *hurt*, and then say, now you know what it feels like, and given today's techniques, that might very well be true. But this is only a limitation on what is known and knowable today; it says nothing about what might be knowable about a human subject of 20th century complexity to entities living a thousand years from now. (We ignore the possible effects on the experimenter's value system, or possible effects on his incentives: we are just talking about information as bit-strings, here.) Obviously there is a difference between *an apple* and *a description of an apple*, in the same way there is a difference between *a person* and *a description of a person*, but the difference is one of physical existence, not information. Yeah, that's the way it seems to me too. Lee
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis wrote [Here is] a neat way to define what is special about first person experience: it is the gap in information between what can be known from a description of an object and what can be known from being the object itself. This is a personal thing, but I think it is at least a little surprising that there should be such a gap, and would never have guessed had I not been conscious myself. Had you not been conscious yourself? Do you think that this is at all possible? That sufficiently complex entities capable of making their way in the world ought to be conscious seems very natural to me, for some reason. When I examine the animal world, for instance, and see small creatures chasing one another, I would expect them to be making maps of their environment; I would expect them to have feelings; and I would expect at some level of development that their maps would include a bit of self-reference. (Just a tad, for the *lower* life forms.) Perhaps I am hard-wired to project my own thoughts and feelings onto others, including animals. Solipsism *really* seems unscientific somehow. I myself have likes and dislikes, and so why shouldn't everyone and everything else? I don't think it is a good idea to simply ignore this gap, Well, I'd agree to call it a *difference*: as I said in another post, the way some of us see it is that there isn't an information gap. but on the other hand, I don't think there is any need to postulate mind/body dualism and try to explain how the two interact. Well, I think that everyone here agrees with that. But of course, you are thinking about the resurgence of dualism. I probably agree with you. Aside from this one difference I have focused on, first person experience is just something that occurs in the normal course of events in the physical universe. Well said. I would like to quote that. I do also read that to include consciousness, as I'm sure you meant. I would also read it to include all the gaps. Lee
What do you lose if you simply accept...
Dear Stathis, In a phrase, I would loose choice. What you are asking me is to give up any hope of understanding how my sense of being-in-the-world is related to any other phenomena in the world of experience and instead to just blindly believe some claim. Are we so frustrated that we will accept authority as a proof of our beliefs? I hope not! Pratt's disdain follows from the obvious failures of other models. It does not take a logician or mathematician or philosopher of unbelievable IQ to see that the models of monism that have been advanced have a fatal flaw: the inability to proof the necessity of epiphenomena. Maybe Bruno's theory will solve this, I hold out hope that it does; but meanwhile, why can't we consider and debate alternatives that offer a view ranging explanations and unifying threads, such as Pratt's Chu space idea? Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 2:36 AM Subject: Re: Olympia's Beautiful and Profound Mind Dear Stephen, The Pratt quote below shows disdain for historical solutions to the mind-body problem, such as Descartes' theory that the two interact through the pineal gland, but goes on to say that this is no reason to throw out dualism altogether. Now, I have to admit, despite spending my adolescence in the thrall of logical positivism (I still think A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic is one of the great masterpieces of 20th century English nonfictional prose), that there is something irreducible about 1st person experience, forever beyond 3rd person verification or falsification; a blind man might learn everything about visual perception, but still have no idea what it is like to see. However, what reason is there to extrapolate from this that there must be some special explanation for the interaction between body and mind? What do you lose if you simply accept, as per Gilbert Ryle, that the mind is what the brain does? Otherwise, you could seek a special explanation for an electronic calculator's matter/mathematics dualism, or a falling stone's matter/energy dualism, or any number of similar examples. Occam's razor would suggest that such complications are unnecessary. --Stathis Papaioannou
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Dear Stephen, I have to confess that the mathematical intricacies of Chu spaces are quite beyond me. However, this passage appears at the introduction to the cited article: We propose to reduce complex mind-body interaction to the elementary interactions of their constituents. Events of the body interact with states of the mind. This interaction has two dual forms. A physical event a in the body A impresses its occurrence on a mental state x of the mind X, written a=|x. Dually, in state x the mind infers the prior occurrence of event a, written x |= a. Tell me if I have completely misconstrued it, but it seems that this is still discussing how the two entities (mind and body) are interacting, and differs only in detail from the 17th century solutions. *Why* do you need to prove the necessity of epiphenomena, and *how* is such a proof providing any more information than the simple observation that the epiphenomena exist? You could go mad seeing dualism everywhere. If I wave my hand in a circular pattern, we have (a) the physical action of moving my hand in a circular pattern, and (b) the circular pattern. Arguably, these are two completely different things. One is an event in the physical world, and the other is a theoretical or mathematical abstraction. How is it that these two completely different entities interact? How can you prove that the physical action of moving my hand in a particular way necessitates the epiphenomenon of the circular pattern? And if you manage to explain that one, how can you explain the experience of being-a-circular-pattern from the inside, or, conversely, the non-experience of being-a-circular-pattern from the inside, whichever is the case? There comes a point where theory and explanation makes us more confused and no more informed than we were before. --Stathis In a phrase, I would loose choice. What you are asking me is to give up any hope of understanding how my sense of being-in-the-world is related to any other phenomena in the world of experience and instead to just blindly believe some claim. Are we so frustrated that we will accept authority as a proof of our beliefs? I hope not! Pratt's disdain follows from the obvious failures of other models. It does not take a logician or mathematician or philosopher of unbelievable IQ to see that the models of monism that have been advanced have a fatal flaw: the inability to proof the necessity of epiphenomena. Maybe Bruno's theory will solve this, I hold out hope that it does; but meanwhile, why can't we consider and debate alternatives that offer a view ranging explanations and unifying threads, such as Pratt's Chu space idea? Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 2:36 AM Subject: Re: Olympia's Beautiful and Profound Mind Dear Stephen, The Pratt quote below shows disdain for historical solutions to the mind-body problem, such as Descartes' theory that the two interact through the pineal gland, but goes on to say that this is no reason to throw out dualism altogether. Now, I have to admit, despite spending my adolescence in the thrall of logical positivism (I still think A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic is one of the great masterpieces of 20th century English nonfictional prose), that there is something irreducible about 1st person experience, forever beyond 3rd person verification or falsification; a blind man might learn everything about visual perception, but still have no idea what it is like to see. However, what reason is there to extrapolate from this that there must be some special explanation for the interaction between body and mind? What do you lose if you simply accept, as per Gilbert Ryle, that the mind is what the brain does? Otherwise, you could seek a special explanation for an electronic calculator's matter/mathematics dualism, or a falling stone's matter/energy dualism, or any number of similar examples. Occam's razor would suggest that such complications are unnecessary. --Stathis Papaioannou _ SEEK: Over 80,000 jobs across all industries at Australia's #1 job site. http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Dear Stathis, Thank you for reading the paper in its entirety. Pratt's idea is very subtle but the difference between the form of dualism that he is explaining is very different from Descartes'. Pratt is considering Mind and body as process, not substance. It is the difference between a Being based paradigm and a Becoming based paradigm. Please continue and take a look at some of the other papers (http://chu.stanford.edu/ ) and notice how Category theory is being used, notice the contravariant morphisms, notice how non-well founded logic is being used. BTW, non-well founded logics handle the circularity that you appear to protest. This circularity is also a key feature that has to been explained in models of consciousness because, at a minimum, we have to explain self-awareness! Pratt doesn't seem to have address the key notion of forgetfulness in the previously referenced paper, which is necessary to deal with irreversibility, but I am sure that that will be dealt with soon enough. The interaction between the hand and the abstraction in your example [or better the information representing the physical hand] is obvious. It is not an interaction, it is an identity in the same way that there is an identification beween a physical object and the class of representations that it can have, be they bitstrings or whatever! Interactions, as Pratt explains, need to be explained between the bodies and between the minds. How is it that my mind can interact with yours, or to put it into COMP terms, how does one bitstring interact with another without some physical instantiation? The interaction problem becomes even more pronounced when we start thinking about QM systems! If you look at the formalism carefully, it is obvious that QM systems are separate from each other in such a way that even the notion of substance exchange between them will simply not work. QM systems are exactly like Leibniz' monads: windowless. Given this fact how do we propose to explain interactions in general and communication between observers in particular? We can not have theories of our universe of experience that only include a single observer! I know well about particle physics theories talking about vector bosons being exchanged but if you look carefully at the QM system involved, the vector bosons are part of the single QM system being considered and not a separate system. There are technical nuances involved here to be sure, but these ideas are not being advanced without careful consideration. I understand all too well the importance of Occam's Razor. ;-) Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 9:07 PM Subject: RE: What do you lose if you simply accept... Dear Stephen, I have to confess that the mathematical intricacies of Chu spaces are quite beyond me. However, this passage appears at the introduction to the cited article: We propose to reduce complex mind-body interaction to the elementary interactions of their constituents. Events of the body interact with states of the mind. This interaction has two dual forms. A physical event a in the body A impresses its occurrence on a mental state x of the mind X, written a=|x. Dually, in state x the mind infers the prior occurrence of event a, written x |= a. Tell me if I have completely misconstrued it, but it seems that this is still discussing how the two entities (mind and body) are interacting, and differs only in detail from the 17th century solutions. *Why* do you need to prove the necessity of epiphenomena, and *how* is such a proof providing any more information than the simple observation that the epiphenomena exist? You could go mad seeing dualism everywhere. If I wave my hand in a circular pattern, we have (a) the physical action of moving my hand in a circular pattern, and (b) the circular pattern. Arguably, these are two completely different things. One is an event in the physical world, and the other is a theoretical or mathematical abstraction. How is it that these two completely different entities interact? How can you prove that the physical action of moving my hand in a particular way necessitates the epiphenomenon of the circular pattern? And if you manage to explain that one, how can you explain the experience of being-a-circular-pattern from the inside, or, conversely, the non-experience of being-a-circular-pattern from the inside, whichever is the case? There comes a point where theory and explanation makes us more confused and no more informed than we were before. --Stathis
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Lee corbin wrote: Pratt's disdain follows from the obvious failures of other models. It does not take a logician or mathematician or philosopher of unbelievable IQ to see that the models of monism that have been advanced have a fatal flaw: the inability to prove the necessity of epiphenomena. Maybe Bruno's theory will solve this, I hold out hope that it does; but meanwhile, why can't we consider and debate alternatives that offer a view ranging explanations and unifying threads, such as Pratt's Chu space idea? I just have to say that I have utterly no sense that anything here needs explanation. I have to agree. Perhaps it is because I'm a Denett devotee, brainwashed into a full denial of qualia/dualism, but I've yet to see any coherent argument as to what there is anything about consciousness that needs explaining. The only importance I see for consciousness is its role in self-selection per Bostrom. Jonathan Colvin
