Hi Bruno Marchal That Is why IMHO Peirce's categories seem necessary to this project.
I. For what we experience comes from Firstness, raw experience. The computer cannot duplicate that, for that state is subjective, which means a living, symbol-free experience. It has no symbolic form yet. II. The symbolic form comes from Secondness, the PERSONAL recognition from memory which Peirce calls a "bump" of an object (if there is one) that was found in Firstness (such as an apple). Now there is the seer and the seen, making two or Secondness. The person recognizes an apple but has not yet placed a name on it. I suppose this state would be a comparative image of an apple drawn from memory. III. Thirdness then occurs when a name (the third item) is applied to the Secondness state above. ------------------------------------------------------------ If the computer were to duplicate the above, it would need I -- a camera viewing an apple II - image recognition software tuned to a given personality and his memory. III - output the word apple I suppose 1p would ( I+ II) and 3p would be (III). ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-23, 11:53:28 Subject: Re: Escaping from the world of 3p Flatland On 23 Jan 2013, at 11:42, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Just trying to clarify things. 1) OK, I partly understand if we allow words as output. ... and inputs. OK. But words are descriptions (3p, or Thirdness), OK. not experience (1p, or Firstness). Yes. Experiences are not words. 2) Let us admit for the moment that it is possible for a computer to be conscious. What would it be conscious of ? The code it is running, which would be like a stream of consciousness, ie an experience ? In fact, a computer is never conscious. Similarly, my brain is not conscious. No more than my liver. It is the (immaterial) person which is conscious. The brain, or the computer, is only a local tool to make that conscious person able to manifest itself relatively to its most probable computational histories. The person is defined mainly by its first person experience, which is not something that we can identify with anything third person describable. But we can define it, at least in a first approximation, by the knower (notably the one who know the content of its memories). It has been shown, by Montague and Kaplan precisely, that like "truth", knowledge by a machine cannot be defined in the language of the machine. But as scientists, by studying much simpler machine than ourselves, we can use a local and little "theory of truth" (like Traski's one) to (meta) define the knowledge of the machine (notably by linking the machine's belief (which are definable and representable in 3p) and truth. This works well, and explains already why the introspecting machine cannot know who she is. The identity card, or even the complete description of her body, will not do the trick (that leads only to a 3p copy, not her). That explains also that the knowing machine can only *bet* on a substitution level, without ever being sure it is correct, making comp asking for an act of faith (similar to some faith in some possible reincarnation). It is counter-intuitive, and it does leads to the reversal: eventually the brain and bodies are construct of the mind, even if they are also related to deep and complex 3p number relations. Consciousness is not due to the running of a computer. It only appears locally to be like that. In the global big picture, it is the running of a computer which appear as an event "in consciousness". I hope this can help a bit. It is hard to explain something counter-intuitive in intuitive terms, and that is why I use the deductive method, starting from the hypothesis that there is a level where we are 3p duplicable. Bruno ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-22, 12:00:41 Subject: Re: Escaping from the world of 3p Flatland On 22 Jan 2013, at 12:36, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal You said: "God, matter, consciousness are never computable" Is that because the above are nonphysical ? Matter is physical, by definition, yet non computable. This follows from the UD Argument. If consciousness is not computable, can ideas be computable ? Yes. Most of them are (the programs, the monads). I'm totally lost. I don't even understand how ANYTHING other than numbers can be computable. Strings of letter are not number, but the operation of concatenation is computable ( a + baba = ababa). Look at your computer, you see mails, letters, etc. Not number, yet all what you do with your computer (like sending a mail) are computable operation. Suppose you do a computation. You get a number or a bunch of numbers. How can you say what they mean ? By remembering the definitions, the axioms I am assuming, etc. I don't see the problem. If you refer to the qualia, this is explain by the peculiarity of the logic of machines self-reference: when machine introspect they can understand things, without completely understanding the understanding process itself. It is normal, but it needs a bot of computer science and mathematical logic to get the complete picture. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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