> > On Sep 21, 2:08 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> >> On 20 Sep 2011, at 04:58, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> >>>>> I include comparison as a function of counting.
> >>>> Counting + the full first order logic is not enough for comparison.
> >>>> Counting + second order logic might be, but then second order logic
> >>>> is
> >>>> really set theory in disguise.
> >>> Isn't it necessary to be able to tell the difference between one
> >>> count
> >>> and one count?
> >>> In order for x, (x+x), (x+x+x) to exist there must be an implicit
> >>> comparison between 1 and it's successor to establish succession,
> >>> mustn't there? Otherwise it's just x, x, x.
> >> I have no clue on what you are trying to say.
> > I'm saying that to assert that two is different from one is a
> > comparison, and that the assertion of difference between predecessor
> > and successor is the root essence of what counting is. Counting is
> > nothing but a process of comparisons.
> This is unclear as long as you don't make your assumptions explicit.
My assumption is that the experience of thinking of quantities in a
series, like 1, 2, 3, 4 is an example of counting.
> >>>>> You can't really have
> >>>>> one without the other.
> >>>> It depends on what you assume at the start. I have still no clue of
> >>>> what is your theory, except that strange, and alas familiar,
> >>>> skepticism on numbers and machine, which is conceptually very
> >>>> demanding since Gödel 1931.
> >>> I think that's your own prejudice blinding you from seeing my ideas.
> >> Which prejudices?
> > The prejudice of arithmetic supremacy.
> I have chosen arithmetic because it is well taught in school. I could
> use any universal (in the Post Turing Kleene Church comp sense)
> machine or theory. And this follows from mechanism. The doctor encoded
> your actual state in a finite device.
I don't understand. Are you saying that you are not arithmetically
biased or that it's natural/unavoidable to be biased?
> >> You are the one talking like if you knew (how?) that some theory
> >> (mechanism) is false, without providing a refutation.
> > What kind of refutation would you like?
> A proof that mechanism entails 0 = 1.
That demands that mechanism be disproved mechanically, which gives an
indication of what the problem with it is, but you have to read
between the lines to get it. A literal approach has limitations which
arise from it's very investment in literalism.
> Note a personal opinion according to which actual human machines are
> creepy.
Not sure what you mean. Individual humans can certainly seem creepy,
but I'm talking about there being a particular difference in our
perception of living things vs non-living things which imitate living
things. Even true of plants. Plastic plants are somewhat creepy in the
same way for the same reason. I don't think that it can be assumed
therefore that humans are only machines. They may be partially
machines, but machines may not ever be a complete description of
humanity.
> > Mechanism is false as an
> > explanation of consciousness
> Mechanism is not proposed as an explanation of consciousness, but as a
> survival technic. The explanation of consciousness just appear to be
> given by any UMs which self-introspect (but that is in the consequence
> of mechanism, not in the assumption). It reduces the mind-body problem
> to a mathematical body problem.
Survival of what? It sounds like you are saying that consciousness is
just a consequence of being conscious, and that this makes the mind
into math.
> > because I think that consciousness arises
> > from feeling which arises from sensation. Perception cannot be
> > constructed out of logic but logic always can only arise out of
> > perception.
> Right. But I use logic+arithmetic, and substituting "logic+arithmetic"
> for your "logic" makes your statement equivalent with non comp. So you
> beg the question.
I don't think that perception can be constructed out of logic
+arithmetic either, but logic+arithmetic are covered under perception.
> >>> You are defending the insights of post Gödelian understanding but I
> >>> have no bone to pick with those insights at all. I embrace what I
> >>> understand of those kinds of ideas; incompleteness, autopoeisis,
> >>> automation, simulation, etc. I just think that the progression of
> >>> these ideas lead to the mirror image of consciousness rather than
> >>> genuine sentience.
> >>> Nothing wrong with that, and for developing intelligent servants,
> >>> it's
> >>> is exactly what we would want to use (otherwise they will most
> >>> enslave
> >>> us). We can even gain great insights into our own nature by
> >>> understanding our similarities and differences to what I would call
> >>> intelliform arithmetic, but in all of the fruits of this approach we
> >>> have seen thus far, there is a distinct quality of aimless
> >>> repetition,
> >>> even if not unpleasantly so (http://www.youtube.com/watch? > >>> v=ZZu5LQ56T18)
> >>> Some of the musicality can be attributed to the sampled piano as
> >>> well.
> >>> When you use a fundamental unit which is driven more exclusively by
> >>> digital mathematics, what we get I think sounds more like the native
> >>> chirps and pulses of abiotic semiconductors (http://www.youtube.com/ > >>> watch?v=Dh9EglZJvZs).
> >>> I think that my reservations about machine sentience are not at all
> >>> borne of skepticism but rather aesthetic supersensitivity. I can
> >>> hear
> >>> what the machine is, and what it is will not become what we are, but
> >>> rather something slightly (but very significantly from our
> >>> perspective
> >>> at least) different.
> >> Who we?
> > We humans, or maybe even we animals.
> Then it is trivial and has no bearing on mechanism. The machine you
> can hear are, I guess, the human made machine. I talk about all
> machines (devices determined by computable laws).
I would say that there are no devices determined by computable laws
alone. They all have a non-comp substance component that contributes
equally to the full phenomenology of the device.
> >> All what I hear is "human made machines are creepy, so I am not a
> >> machine, not even a natural one?".
> >> This is irrational, and non valid.
> > I'm not saying that I'm not a machine, I'm just saying that I am also
> > the opposite of a machine.
> This follows from mechanism. If 3-I is a machine, then, from my
> perspective, 1-I is not a machine.
I think it's a continuum. Some parts of 1-I are more or less
mechanical than others, and some 3-I machine appearances are more or
less mechanical than others. Poetry is an example of a 1-p experience
which is less mechanical than a 1-p experience of running in place. A
rabbit is less mechanical of a 3-p experience than a mailbox. Do you
agree or do you think it must be a binary distinction?
> > It's not based upon a presumed truth of
> > creepy stereotypes, but the existence and coherence of those
> > stereotypes supports the other observations which suggest a
> > fundamental difference between machine logic and sentient feeling.
> Logic + arithmetic. The devil is in the detail.
Why would the addition of arithmetic address feeling?
> >>>>> As for exploring and referring to themselves I
> >>>>> think that's just projection of our own 1p experience onto
> >>>>> mechanism.
> >>>> That is possible, and literally necessary. I am currently
> >>>> projecting
> >>>> my 1p on you. That is not a reason for saying your don't have your
> >>>> own
> >>>> 1p. So you are correct, but it is not an argument against
> >>>> mechanism.
> >>> That's only if you believe that 1p is a solipsistic simulation. With
> >>> my sense-based model,
> >> I suggest you use the word "theory" instead of model which has a
> >> precise meaning for logicians.
> >> When I asked you to provide the theory, you said it was poetry.
> > I didn't say that it was only poetry. My sense-based theory is that
> > sensorimotive perception is the ontological complement to
> > electromagnetic relativity.
> Define "ontological complement to electromagnetic relativity." Please
> be clear on what you are assuming to make this concept sense full.
Ontological complement, meaning it is the other half of the process or
principle behind electromagnetism and relativity (which I see as one
thing; roughly 'The Laws of Physics' which I see as 3-p, mechanical,
and pertaining to matter and energy as objects rather than
experiences). When we observe physical phenomena in 3-p changing and
moving, we attribute it to 'forces' and 'fields' which exist in space
but within ourselves we experience those same phenomena as feelings
through time (sense) which insist upon our participation (motive).
> > Poetry is your term that you injected into
> > this.
> > I was just confirming your intuition that poetry is an example
> > of how sensorimotive phenomena work - figurative semantic association
> > of qualities rather than literal mechanistic functions of quantity.
> You were then just eluding the definition of sensorimotive. You
> continue to do rhetorical tricks.
I'm not eluding the definition, I am saying that by definition it
cannot be literally defined. It is the opposite of literal - it is
figurative. That's how it gets one thing (I/we) out of many (the
experience of a trillion neurons or billions of human beings).
> My assumption is that the experience of thinking of quantities in a > series, like 1, 2, 3, 4 is an example of counting.
This is fuzzy. Now, even if you succeed in making explicit assumptions from which you can derive a form of counting, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ..., you are might not yet been able to justify, or even define that 3 is smaller than 5. Usually "x < y" is defined by "it exists z such that x + z = y. You need some explicit assumption for the manipulation of "+".
>>> The prejudice of arithmetic supremacy.
>> I have chosen arithmetic because it is well taught in school. I could >> use any universal (in the Post Turing Kleene Church comp sense) >> machine or theory. And this follows from mechanism. The doctor >> encoded >> your actual state in a finite device.
> I don't understand. Are you saying that you are not arithmetically > biased or that it's natural/unavoidable to be biased?
I am not arithmetically biased. I have make some attempt for using combinators in the place of numbers. I am "finitistically" biased, as any computationalist. But to handle finite things, we can works with numbers, or other Turing universal system.
>>>> You are the one talking like if you knew (how?) that some theory >>>> (mechanism) is false, without providing a refutation.
>>> What kind of refutation would you like?
>> A proof that mechanism entails 0 = 1.
> That demands that mechanism be disproved mechanically,
Not necessarily. But indeed, it is better that the process of verification of the proof, even if informal, can easily be thought as capable of being formalized, so that anyone can, with enough patience, be convinced.
> which gives an > indication of what the problem with it is, but you have to read > between the lines to get it. A literal approach has limitations which > arise from it's very investment in literalism.
Lol. You might become a good lawyer.
>> Note a personal opinion according to which actual human machines are >> creepy.
> Not sure what you mean. Individual humans can certainly seem creepy, > but I'm talking about there being a particular difference in our > perception of living things vs non-living things which imitate living > things. Even true of plants. Plastic plants are somewhat creepy in the > same way for the same reason. I don't think that it can be assumed > therefore that humans are only machines. They may be partially > machines, but machines may not ever be a complete description of > humanity.
There is no complete description of humanity, nor is there any complete theory of what are and can be machine. For the nth times, you are just showing prejudice.
You think like that: axiom: machines are necessarily stupid, you tell me that I might be a machine, so you tell me that I might be stupid.
I think like that: axiom: I might be not stupid. You tell me that I am a machine. Nice, some machine might be non stupid.
>>> Mechanism is false as an >>> explanation of consciousness
>> Mechanism is not proposed as an explanation of consciousness, but >> as a >> survival technic. The explanation of consciousness just appear to be >> given by any UMs which self-introspect (but that is in the >> consequence >> of mechanism, not in the assumption). It reduces the mind-body >> problem >> to a mathematical body problem.
> Survival of what?
Of your soul.
> It sounds like you are saying that consciousness is > just a consequence of being conscious, and that this makes the mind > into math.
The assumption: I can survive with a digital brain, like I can survive with an artificial heart. The consequence: an explanation of both mind and matter can be extracted from addition and multiplication.
>>> because I think that consciousness arises >>> from feeling which arises from sensation. Perception cannot be >>> constructed out of logic but logic always can only arise out of >>> perception.
>> Right. But I use logic+arithmetic, and substituting "logic >> +arithmetic" >> for your "logic" makes your statement equivalent with non comp. So >> you >> beg the question.
> I don't think that perception can be constructed out of logic > +arithmetic either, but logic+arithmetic are covered under perception.
But this is what we are expecting an explanation for. Again, you are just saying that for *you* it seems obvious that a machine cannot be conscious in virtue of processing the relevant information. But in this field NOTHING is obvious. And usually, people pretending to be sure on those matter, have slowed the progress, when not torturing those who dare to doubt.
>>>> Who we?
>>> We humans, or maybe even we animals.
>> Then it is trivial and has no bearing on mechanism. The machine you >> can hear are, I guess, the human made machine. I talk about all >> machines (devices determined by computable laws).
> I would say that there are no devices determined by computable laws > alone. They all have a non-comp substance component that contributes > equally to the full phenomenology of the device.
That is right, and is a non trivial (rarely understood) consequence of the comp hypothesis. Any piece of matter has to obey to the statistics coming from the first person indeterminacy, and the presence of oracle in the UD* (the arithmetical running of the UD) entails a priori some non computable feature sustaining the stability of that piece of matter. Indeed, it is an open problem if the no-comp aspect is not more important than the one we can already infer from observation (like in QM or Q Many Worlds). So again, that alley will not work for refuting comp.
>>>> All what I hear is "human made machines are creepy, so I am not a >>>> machine, not even a natural one?". >>>> This is irrational, and non valid.
>>> I'm not saying that I'm not a machine, I'm just saying that I am >>> also >>> the opposite of a machine.
>> This follows from mechanism. If 3-I is a machine, then, from my >> perspective, 1-I is not a machine.
> I think it's a continuum. Some parts of 1-I are more or less > mechanical than others, and some 3-I machine appearances are more or > less mechanical than others. Poetry is an example of a 1-p experience > which is less mechanical than a 1-p experience of running in place. A > rabbit is less mechanical of a 3-p experience than a mailbox. Do you > agree or do you think it must be a binary distinction?
You might be right, and comp makes it possible to make this testable. It is not binary, given the 4+4*infinity internal person points of view accessible to machines.
>>> It's not based upon a presumed truth of >>> creepy stereotypes, but the existence and coherence of those >>> stereotypes supports the other observations which suggest a >>> fundamental difference between machine logic and sentient feeling.
>> Logic + arithmetic. The devil is in the detail.
> Why would the addition of arithmetic address feeling?
Technically, addition is not enough, but addition and multiplication (of integers, not of real numbers!) is enough to get universal löbian machine, and they have rich introspective abilities. They have feelings, provably so if you accept some definition of feeling of the literature (especially in the Theaetus-Plato-Plotinus family).
>> Define "ontological complement to electromagnetic relativity." Please >> be clear on what you are assuming to make this concept sense full.
> Ontological complement, meaning it is the other half of the process or > principle behind electromagnetism and relativity (which I see as one > thing;
So you assume physics.
> roughly 'The Laws of Physics' which I see as 3-p, mechanical, > and pertaining to matter and energy as objects rather than > experiences).
Hmm. I can make sense, with a lot of works.
> When we observe physical phenomena in 3-p changing and > moving, we attribute it to 'forces' and 'fields' which exist in space > but within ourselves we experience those same phenomena as feelings > through time (sense) which insist upon our participation (motive).
Here I see just a variant of the usual identity thesis. I don't see any explanation of what is mind, nor matter. At least serious Aristotelian philosophers of mind agree that the mind- boy problem is far from having a solution.
>>> Poetry is your term that you injected into >>> this. >>> I was just confirming your intuition that poetry is an example >>> of how sensorimotive phenomena work - figurative semantic >>> association >>> of qualities rather than literal mechanistic functions of quantity.
>> You were then just eluding the definition of sensorimotive. You >> continue to do rhetorical tricks.
> I'm not eluding the definition, I am saying that by definition it > cannot be literally defined. It is the opposite of literal - it is > figurative. That's how it gets one thing (I/we) out of many (the > experience of a trillion neurons or billions of human beings).
Comp explains a lot, and give rise to precise technical problem. You are doing the old trick : "don't ask, don't search".
>>>> I find a bit grave to use poetry to make strong negative >>>> statement on >>>> the possibilities of some entities.
>>> That's because you are an arithmetic supremacist,
>> I assume things like 17 is prime!
> I have no problem with 17 being prime, of course that is true.
What a relief. I am serious. Sometimes discussion on comp with non- comp people end up on differing on that question.
> I would > even say that the kinds of truth arithmetic sensorimotives present is > supremely unambiguous,
Well, technically, they still are. We just cannot define the numbers. All reasonable axiomatic of numbers have some intrinsic fuzzyness, and bizarre object, clearly NOT numbers still verify the axioms. But OK. It is a bit beyond the scope of
...
On Sep 23, 11:13 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 12:09 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>You claim
> >> that ion channels can open and neurons fire in response to thoughts
> >> rather than a chain of physical events.
> > No, I observe that ion channels do in fact open and neurons do indeed
> > fire, not 'in response' to thoughts but as the public physical view of
> > events which are subjectively experienced as thoughts. The conclusion
> > that you continue to jump to is that thoughts are caused by physical
> > events rather than being the experience of events which also have a
> > physical dimension.
> Do you agree or don't you that the observable (or public, or third
> person) behaviour of neurons can be entirely explained in terms of a
> chain of physical events?
No, nothing can be *entirely* explained in terms of a chain of
physical events in the way that you assume physical events occur.
Physical events are a shared experiences, dependent upon the
perceptual capabilities and choices of the participants in them. That
is not to say we that the behavior of neurons can't be *adequately*
explained for specific purposes: medical, biochemical,
electromagnetic, etc.
> At times you have said that thoughts, over
> and above physical events, have an influence on neuronal behaviour.
> For an observer (who has no access to whatever subjectivity the
> neurons may have) that would mean that neurons sometimes fire
> apparently without any trigger, since if thoughts are the trigger this
> is not observable.
No. Thoughts are not the trigger of physical events, they are the
experiential correlate of the physical events. It is the sense that
the two phenomenologies make together that is the trigger.
> If, on the other hand, neurons do not fire in the
> absence of physical stimuli (which may have associated with them
> subjectivity - the observer cannot know this)
We know that for example, gambling affects the physical behavior of
the amygdala. What physical force do you posit that emanates from
'gambling' that penetrates the skull and blood brain barrier to
mobilize those neurons?
> then it would appear
> that the brain's activity is a chain of physical events, which could
> be computed.
If you watch a color TV show on a black and white TV, then it would
appear that the TV show is a black and white event. It's not that the
events are physical, it's that they have a physical side when they are
detected by the physical side of an observer.
> >>This would be magic by
> >> definition, and real magic rather than just apparent magic due to our
> >> ignorance, since the thoughts are not directly observable by any
> >> experimental technique.
> > Thoughts are not observed, they are experienced directly. There is
> > nothing magic about them, except that our identification with them
> > makes them hard to grasp and makes it easy for us take them for
> > granted.
> But if thoughts influence behaviour and thoughts are not observed,
> then observation of a brain would show things happening contrary to
> physical laws,
No. Thought are not observed by an MRI. An MRI can only show the
physical shadow of the experiences taking place.
>such as neurons apparently firing for no reason, i.e.
> magically. You haven't clearly refuted this, perhaps because you can
> see it would result in a mechanistic brain.
No, I have refuted it over and over and over and over and over. You
aren't listening to me, you are stuck in your own cognitive loop.
Please don't accuse me of this again until you have a better
understanding of what I mean what I'm saying about the relationship
between gambling and the amygdala.
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we
created them" - A. Einstein.
> >> How does nature "know" more than a computer simulation?
> > Because nature has to know everything. What nature doesn't know is not
> > possible, by definition. A computer simulation can only report what we
> > have programmed it to test for, it doesn't know anything by itself. A
> > real cell knows what to do when it encounters any particular
> > condition, whereas a computer simulation of a cell will fail if it
> > encounters a condition which was not anticipated in the program.
> A neuron has a limited number of duties: to fire if it sees a certain
> potential difference across its cell membrane or a certain
> concentration of neurotransmitter.
That is a gross reductionist mispresentation of neurology. You are
giving the brain less functionality than mold. Tell me, how does this
conversation turn into cell membrane potentials or neurotransmitters?
>That's all that has to be
> simulated. A neuron doesn't have one response for when, say, the
> central bank raises interest rates and another response for when it
> lowers interest rates; all it does is respond to what its neighbours
> in the network are doing, and because of the complexity of the
> network, a small change in input can cause a large change in overall
> brain behaviour.
So if I move my arm, that's because the neurons that have nothing to
do with my arm must have caused the ones that do relate to my arm to
fire? And 'I' think that I move 'my arm' because why exactly?
If the brain of even a flea were anywhere remotely close to the
simplistic goofiness that you describe, we should have figured out
human consciousness completely 200 years ago.
> >>I don't know
> >> what I'm going to do tomorrow or all the possible inputs I might
> >> receive from the universe tomorrow. A simulation is no different: in
> >> general, you don't know what it's going to do until it does it.
> > A simulation is different in that it is trying to simulate something
> > else. The genuine subject of simulation can never be wrong because it
> > is not trying to be anything other than what it is. If you have a
> > computer program that simulates an acorn, it is always going to be
> > different from an acorn in that if the behavior of the two things
> > diverges, the simulation will always be 'wrong'.
> In theory we can simulate something perfectly if its behaviour is
> computable, in practice we can't but we try to simulate it
> sufficiently accurately. The brain has a level of engineering
> tolerance, or you would experience radical mental state changes every
> time you shook your head. So the simulation doesn't have to get it
> exactly right down to the quantum level.
Why would you experience a 'radical' mental state change? Why not just
an appropriate mental state change? Likewise your simulation will
experience an appropriate mental state to what is being used
materially to simulate it.
> >>Even
> >> the simplest simulation of a brain treating neurons as switches would
> >> result in fantastically complex behaviour. The roundworm c. elegans
> >> has 302 neurons and treating them as on/off switches leads to 2^302 =
> >> 8*10^91 permutations.
> > Again, complexity does not impress me as far as a possibility for
> > making the difference between awareness and non-awareness.
> My point was that even a simulation of a very simple nervous system
> produces such a fantastic degree of complexity that it is impossible
> to know what it will do until you actually run the program. It is,
> like the weather, unpredictable and surprising even though it is
> deterministic.
There is still no link between predictability and intentionality. You
might be able to predict what I'm going to order from a menu at a
restaurant, but that doesn't mean that I'm not choosing it. You might
not be able to predict a tsunami, but that doesn't mean it's because
the tsunami is choosing to do something. The difference, I think, has
to do with more experiential depth in between each input and output.
> >> If philosophical zombies are possible then we
> >> are back with the fading qualia thought experiment: part of your brain
> >> is replaced with an analogue that behaves (third person observable
> >> behaviour, to be clear) like the biological equivalent but is not
> >> conscious, resulting in you being a partial zombie but behaving
> >> normally, including declaring that you have normal vision or whatever
> >> the replaced modality is.
> > No. You're stuck in a loop. If we do a video Skype, the moving image
> > and sound representing me is a philosophical zombie. If you ask it if
> > it feels and sees, it will tell you yes, but the image on your screen
> > is not feeling anything.
> When you see someone in real life you see their skin moving, but that
> doesn't mean the skin is conscious or the skin is a philosophical
> zombie. It is the thing driving the skin that we are concerned about.
Huh? If you ask their skin if it feels and sees it won't answer you.
> >>The only way out of this conclusion (which
> >> you have agreed is absurd) given that the brain functions following
> >> the laws of physics is to say that if the replacement part behaves
> >> normally (third person observable behaviour, I have to keep reminding
> >> you) then it must also have normal consciousness.
> > I understand perfectly why you think this argument works, but you
> > seemingly don't understand that my explanations and examples refute
> > your false dichotomy. Just as a rule of thumb, anytime someone says
> > something like "The only way out of this (meaning their) conclusion "
> > My assessment is that their mind is frozen in a defensive state and
> > cannot accept new information.
> You have agreed (sort of) that partial zombies are absurd
No. Stuffed animals are partial zombies to young children. It's a
linguistic failure to describe reality truthfully, not an insight into
the truth of consciousness.
On Sep 23, 3:17 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 23 Sep 2011, at 02:42, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> > My assumption is that the experience of thinking of quantities in a
> > series, like 1, 2, 3, 4 is an example of counting.
> This is fuzzy. Now, even if you succeed in making explicit assumptions
> from which you can derive a form of counting, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...,
> you are might not yet been able to justify, or even define that 3 is
> smaller than 5.
You're right for sure that counting alone does not imply >, <, or +,
but to say that 3 is smaller than 5 is even more explicitly a
comparison.
> Usually "x < y" is defined by "it exists z such that x + z = y. You
> need some explicit assumption for the manipulation of "+".
I don't think that you do need an explicit assumption. Wouldn't that
be a third order logic about the first order counting and second order
<> operations? If we are talking about the sensorimotive feelings
which underlie arithmetic we need only a sense of 'more'.
For instance, you can look at two piles of staples and guess wrong
about which one has more. The fact of the literal count does not
generate a corresponding feeling of 'moreness', but a feeling of
moreness can be quantified and attached to a literal count.
> >> I have chosen arithmetic because it is well taught in school. I could
> >> use any universal (in the Post Turing Kleene Church comp sense)
> >> machine or theory. And this follows from mechanism. The doctor
> >> encoded
> >> your actual state in a finite device.
> > I don't understand. Are you saying that you are not arithmetically
> > biased or that it's natural/unavoidable to be biased?
> I am not arithmetically biased. I have make some attempt for using
> combinators in the place of numbers.
> I am "finitistically" biased, as any computationalist. But to handle
> finite things, we can works with numbers, or other Turing universal
> system.
I don't see why finite has to be equated with computable though. Red
is finite, but not computable. Hilarious is finite, but not
quantifiable.
> >>>> You are the one talking like if you knew (how?) that some theory
> >>>> (mechanism) is false, without providing a refutation.
> >>> What kind of refutation would you like?
> >> A proof that mechanism entails 0 = 1.
> > That demands that mechanism be disproved mechanically,
> Not necessarily. But indeed, it is better that the process of
> verification of the proof, even if informal, can easily be thought as
> capable of being formalized, so that anyone can, with enough patience,
> be convinced.
That excludes any truths which require the voluntary participation of
the thinker to convince themselves. This is the crux of the problem
with mechanism. It is predicated on a voyeuristic ontology, which I
stipulate is theoretically possible, but is quite literally impossible
to realize. To 'prove' that you exist is to eat your own head, tail
first. Rather than trying to dodge that as an anomaly, I think you
have to build the hypothesis from that point as the foundation.
Just as the revelations of Galileo and Darwin required a braver
confrontation with 'what actually is the case' than would earlier
religious reckonings allow, these new understandings make empiricism
seem lazy and cowardly. 'Convince me.' they say. 'Make it so I am
overpowered by the evidence and have no ability to resist no matter
how hard I try'.. The perfect ethos to usher in an era of
patriarchical industrial conquest. The thing is that this ethos is
played out. That era has peaked already, and no has devolved into it's
decadent self-absorbed period. The new truths are sense based.
Observation is the new existence. These truths you must meet half way.
You must reclaim your share of 'common sense' and rescue your
orphaned and disqualified subjectivity.
> > which gives an
> > indication of what the problem with it is, but you have to read
> > between the lines to get it. A literal approach has limitations which
> > arise from it's very investment in literalism.
> >> Note a personal opinion according to which actual human machines are
> >> creepy.
> > Not sure what you mean. Individual humans can certainly seem creepy,
> > but I'm talking about there being a particular difference in our
> > perception of living things vs non-living things which imitate living
> > things. Even true of plants. Plastic plants are somewhat creepy in the
> > same way for the same reason. I don't think that it can be assumed
> > therefore that humans are only machines. They may be partially
> > machines, but machines may not ever be a complete description of
> > humanity.
> There is no complete description of humanity, nor is there any
> complete theory of what are and can be machine.
> For the nth times, you are just showing prejudice.
Just because they both cannot be described completely doesn't mean
that they intersect.
> You think like that:
> axiom: machines are necessarily stupid, you tell me that I might be a
> machine, so you tell me that I might be stupid.
Not at all. I know you think that's what I think but it's your
prejudice against my position. Machines are much smarter than us at
some things, not as smart at others, and not capable at all for still
other things. They are just different. Just like not all plants are
edible. It's not to say that plants which are inedible to us are less
than food, just that they aren't food for us.
> I think like that:
> axiom: I might be not stupid. You tell me that I am a machine. Nice,
> some machine might be non stupid.
I understand that, but you don't see that I've already been there done
that. I used to subscribe to that perspective too. In theory it makes
perfect sense. We are sort of badly wired robots bumping into each
other (and that is of course true), so it makes sense that a really
nicely designed robot would be a big improvement. In practice though,
there is something missing. Something subtle from a 3-p perspective,
but quite significant from a 1-p perspective. If the theory were
correct, that should not be the case and even the simplest logical
program should give us warm inviting feelings - a deep comfort like
hearing a human voice on the other end of the phone instead of a
voicemail system when we really need help. It's not like that though.
Mechanistic perfection leaves many people with a cold and sterile
feeling. Not in spite of it's perfection, but in spite of our
theoretical assumptions of perfection. Like medieval medicine, we just
don't have it right yet. We are convinced that we are going in the
right direction, again and again true progress seems to elude us on
every front.
> >>> Mechanism is false as an
> >>> explanation of consciousness
> >> Mechanism is not proposed as an explanation of consciousness, but
> >> as a
> >> survival technic. The explanation of consciousness just appear to be
> >> given by any UMs which self-introspect (but that is in the
> >> consequence
> >> of mechanism, not in the assumption). It reduces the mind-body
> >> problem
> >> to a mathematical body problem.
> > Survival of what?
> Of your soul.
Ohh. In my view survival of the soul may be a foregone conclusion if
we understand that the singularity is the universe with all of the
time and space nullified.
> > It sounds like you are saying that consciousness is
> > just a consequence of being conscious, and that this makes the mind
> > into math.
> The assumption: I can survive with a digital brain, like I can survive
> with an artificial heart.
The problem is that you aren't part of your heart, but you are part of
your brain.
> The consequence: an explanation of both mind and matter can be
> extracted from addition and multiplication.
But what is addition and multiplication extracted from?
> >>> because I think that consciousness arises
> >>> from feeling which arises from sensation. Perception cannot be
> >>> constructed out of logic but logic always can only arise out of
> >>> perception.
> >> Right. But I use logic+arithmetic, and substituting "logic
> >> +arithmetic"
> >> for your "logic" makes your statement equivalent with non comp. So
> >> you
> >> beg the question.
> > I don't think that perception can be constructed out of logic
> > +arithmetic either, but logic+arithmetic are covered under perception.
> But this is what we are expecting an explanation for. Again, you are
> just saying that for *you* it seems obvious that a machine cannot be
> conscious in virtue of processing the relevant information.
> But in this field NOTHING is obvious.
> And usually, people pretending to be sure on those matter, have slowed
> the progress, when not torturing those who dare to doubt.
I'm the one daring to doubt. In theory it isn't obvious that a machine
cannot be conscious (independent of it's material enactment, which
will provide whatever awareness can be utilized), but in practice, it
does not at all appear to be the case. If it were we wouldn't be
struggling to build faster smarter machines, we would just stick them
in tanks of warm bubbly mineral oil and let them lead the way.
> >> Then it is trivial and has no bearing on mechanism. The machine you
> >> can hear are, I guess, the human made machine. I talk about all
> >> machines (devices determined by computable laws).
> > I would say that there are no devices determined by computable laws
> > alone. They all have a non-comp substance component that contributes
> > equally to the full phenomenology of the device.
On Sep 23, 3:17 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 23 Sep 2011, at 02:42, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> > It is a comparison made by a third
> > person observer of a human presentation against their expectations of
> > said human presentation. Substitution 'level' similarly implies that
> > there is an objective standard for expectations of humanity. I don't
> > think that there is such a thing.
> It all depend what you mean by "objective standard".
That there is some kind of actual set of criteria which make the
difference between human and non human. Some apes probably have more
human qualities than some humans, and some artificial brain extensions
will probably have more human qualities than others. I don't think
that it's likely to be able to replace a significant part of the brain
with digital appliances though. I would compare it with body
prosthetics. An organ here or a limb there, sure, but replacing a
spinal cord or brain stem with something non-biological is probably
not going to work.
> I'm afraid that in the near (but not so near future) rich people will
> have lower level digital brain than poor people.
> And, probably by a sort of intrinsic supersitution, the human will
> build ever lower subts-level digital brain.
> Some will be "enlightened" as be glad with very high susbt level, or
> just accept having no brain, and lose interest for manifesting them on
> this branch or reality.
> Even if 100% of humanity bet on comp, there will be a vast amount of
> variety of human implementation of that idea. In fact comp implies
> less norm, less evidences, more questions, more possibilities.
> >>> There is no zombie, only prognosia/HADD.
> >> If there is no zombie, then non-comp implies an infinitely low level.
> > No, it's not that zombies can't theoretically exist, it's that they
> > don't exist in practice because the whole idea of zombies is a red
> > herring based upon comp assumptions to begin with.
> The technical notion of zombie does not rely on comp. It is just a
> human, acting normally, but which is assumed to be without any inner
> life. Non-comp + current data makes them plausible, which is an
> argument for comp.
I think that the whole premise is too flawed to be useful in practical
considerations. It posits that there is a such thing as 'acting
normally'. The existence of sociopathy indicates that there are
naturally occurring 'partial zombies' already to the extent that it
means anything, but that the concept or p-zombies itself assumes that
human 'normalcy' can be ascertained by observing moment to moment
behavior rather than over a lifetime. A fully digital person, like
digital music, may satisfy many of the qualities we associate with a
person, but always carry with them a clear inauthenticity which seems
aimless and empty. If they are simulating a person who is already like
that, then it could be said that they have achieved substitution
level, but it's not really a robust test of the principle.
> > If you don't assume
> > that substance can be separated from function completely, then there
> > is no meaning to the idea of zombies. It's like dehydrated water.
> I am rather skeptical on substance. But I tend to believe in waves and
> particles, because group theory can explain them. But I don't need
> substance for that. And with comp, ther is no substance that we can
> related, even indirectly, to consciousness. I see the notion of
> substance as the Achilles' heel of the Aristotelian theories.
But if you are saying that zombies cannot exist, doesn't that mean
that positing a substance that automatically is associated with a
particular set of functions. Otherwise you could just program
something to behave like a zombie.
To say that comp prevents zombies is actually a self-defeating
argument I think. It seems to violate the principle of universal
emulation so that you could not, for instance have one digital person
which was the virtualized slave of another, because the second digital
body would be, in effect, a zombie. This seems to inject a special
case of arbitrary Turing limitation. Consider the example of remote
desktop software, where we can shell out one computer to another. What
happens to the host computer's 'consciousness'? Does it not become a
partial zombie, unable to locally control it's behavior?
> >>> There is no
> >>> substitution 'level', only a ratios of authenticity.
> >> ?
> > Say a plastic plant is 100% authentic at a distance of 50 years by the
> > naked eye, but 20% likely to be deemed authentic at a distance of
> > three feet. Some people have better eyesight. Some are more familiar
> > with plants. Some are paying more attention. Some are on
> > hallucinogens, etc There is no substitution level at which a plastic
> > plant functions 100% as a plant from all possible observers through
> > all time and not actually be a genuine plant. Substitution as a
> > concrete existential reality is a myth. It's just a question of
> > arbitrarily fixing an acceptable set of perceptions by particular
> > categories of observers and taking it for functional equivalence.
> An entity suffering in a box, does suffer, independently of any
> observers.
A box can contain a body, but it's not clear that it can contain the
experience with that body. Sensory isolation in humans leads to rapid
escape into the imagining psyche. But if you want to stick with a flat
read of the example, we could say that the box is an observer, at
least to the extent that it's existence must resist the escape of the
trapped entity.
> >>> The closer your
> >>> substitute is to native human sensemaking material, the more of the
> >>> brain can be replaced with it, but with diminishing returns at high
> >>> levels so that complete replacement would not be desirable.
> >> That is even worst. This entails partial zombies. It does not make
> >> sense. I remind you that zombie, by definition, cannot be seen as
> >> such
> >> by their behavior at all.
> > That's the theoretical description of a zombie. Like dehydrated water.
> > In reality, one observer's zombie is another observer's non-descript
> > stranger in the park. There is no validity to these observations
> > relative to the would-be zombie's quality of subjectivity.
> We are always talking in a theory. Reality is what we search.
My point was that zombies as they are described cannot exist, and that
the real world principle the device of zombiehood is intended to
defeat is not even addressed.
> >>>>> Genuine because it is the native 1-p
> >>>>> of our 3-p neurology, and not an idiopathic simulacra.
> >>>> You beg the question.
> >>> I don't think I am. I'm saying that a semiconductor computer can't
> >>> appreciate music because music is a sense experience that is
> >>> perceptually mismatched to it's sensemaking capabilities - not
> >>> because
> >>> of any sentimental prejudice I have against technology overreaching
> >>> into human domains.
> >> This makes humans magical object, or the subst level infinitely low,
> >> or it entails zombies.
> > Not at all. It just makes human music a human subject, one not
> > necessarily shared with basketballs and water fountains. Just as
> > Chinese language is a human subject shared by humans who speak
> > Chinese. The universe is all sense - experiential texts which are
> > meaningful in different contexts, all overlapping dynamically.
> >>>>> There is no
> >>>>> reason to think that our naive theoretical presumptions about 3-p
> >>>>> substitution level of 1-p would be any more accurate than any of
> >>>>> our
> >>>>> naive theoretical presumptions about anything. We don't know
> >>>>> much of
> >>>>> anything about the substitution level of the psyche.
> >>>> People differ on which one. The neurophilosophers suggest the
> >>>> neuronal
> >>>> level. Hammerof suggest the quantum level.
> >>> Those are examples of our contemporary consensus naive theoretical
> >>> presumptions.
> >> Mechanism is discussed in the literature since thousand of years. It
> >> has nothing to do with current technology, except for the
> >> mathematical
> >> discovery of universal machine (before computers were build,
> >> excepting
> >> Babbage premature ideas).
> > I was referring to your examples of neuronal and quantum levels -
> > which would be relatively contemporary, no?
> We better use the contemporary image to help people see the validity
> of argument, but I could reason with clock-wheels like machine. The
> key point is the mathematical notion of universality (for computation).
It would be more interesting to use the clock-wheel version so that
people could see the invalidity of the argument ;)
> >>>> Everyone agree that if the level is infinitely low, then current
> >>>> physics is false. To speculate that physics is false for making
> >>>> machine stupid is a bit of far stretching.
> >>> Physics isn't false, it's just incomplete.
> >> No, it has to false for making the substitution level infinitely low.
> >> *ALL* theories, including the many one trying to marry gravitation
> >> and
> >> the quantum entails its Turing emulability.
> > The substitution level isn't infinitely low, it's just not applicable
> > at all. There is no substitution level of white for black, lead for
> > gold, up for down, etc. I doubt the objective existence of
> > 'substitution'. Substitution is an interpretation - not necessarily a
> > voluntary one, but an interpretation nonetheless.
> So, what will you say if your daughter accept an artificial brain?
> Substitution is an operational term, like castration, lobotomy, etc.
I would say she would be committing suicide, unless the technology had
already
...
> >>>>> We are machines and we can
> >>>>> feel, therefore machines can feel. Jet engines are machines they
> >>>>> can
> >>>>> fly at 30,000 feet, therefore we can fly at 30,000 feet.
> >>>> Indeed.
> >>> Without an airplane?
> >> 'course not.
> >>>>> I'd like to
> >>>>> help you out here and really give you the benefit of the doubt,
> >>>>> but it
> >>>>> just sounds like you're shrugging off a fairly obvious gap between
> >>>>> theory and reality. If functionalism-machinism were true, I would
> >>>>> expect that bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, etc could infect
> >>>>> computers, cell phones, or computations themselves.
> >>>> But they can be infected by digital viruses. To ask a program to be
> >>>> infected by a carbon based viruses is just a begging of the
> >>>> question,
> >>>> and a confusion of reality levels.
> >>> Why is it any different to ask a program to be infected by carbon
> >>> based personalities?
> >> Why would that be possible. A virus programmed to feed on plants can
> >> already not feed on animals. There is no virus capable of infecting
> >> all life forms. Why would programs need a carbon based virus for
> >> being
> >> alive. This is a non sequitur.
> > It's not a matter of being alive, because you are already saying that
> > one machine is as alive as another (or that it scales with degree of
> > functional complexity).
> One you put in parenthesis is the key thing. And it is not really a
> question of scale, but of threshold.
I can see that there is a functional threshold between the life and
death or sleeping and waking of an individual organism, but are you
also saying that there are functional thresholds which define the
aliveness of entire species? It seems to me that death would be a
problem for comp. How does comp simulate irreversible deaths? Couldn't
you always run the tape backwards?
> > It's a matter of being alive like we human
> > beings are alive. No virus is capable of infecting all life forms but
> > no life form is immune from all viruses. All life forms are immune to
> > computer viruses though, and all computers are immune to all
> > biological viruses. I'm asking why would a human personality be any
> > more likely to inhabit a computer than a human virus?
> ? because a human virus has very limited range of possibilities,
> compared to a human.
That should make it even easier for a virus to inhabit a computer?
> >>>>> By comp, there should be no particular reason why a Turing machine
> >>>>> should no be vulnerable to the countless (presumably Turing
> >>>>> emulable)
> >>>>> pathogens floating around.
> >>>> They are no programmed for doing that. They are programmed to
> >>>> infect
> >>>> very particular organism.
> >>> If it's close enough to emulate the consciousness of a particular
> >>> organism, why not it's vulnerability to infections?
> >> Because it has different clothes, and virus needs the clothes to get
> >> the key for infecting.
> > What are the clothes made of? If arithmetic, then it's just a matter
> > of cracking the code to make a computer virus run in humans. Why
> > wouldn't a human brain be our clothes, so that we need it to get the
> > key for consciousness?
> That's follows from the UDA. But comp is assumed there (not proved).
> >>>>> But of course that is absurd. We cannot
> >>>>> look forward to reviving the world economy by introducing medicine
> >>>>> and
> >>>>> vaccines for computer hardware. What accounts for this one-way
> >>>>> bubble
> >>>>> which enjoys both total immunity from biological threats but
> >>>>> provides
> >>>>> full access to biological functions? If computation alone were
> >>>>> enough
> >>>>> for life, at what point will the dogs start to smell it?
> >>>> Confusion of level.
> >>>> With comp, dogs already smell them, in some sense.
> >>> Not confusion of level; clarification of level. In what sense do
> >>> dogs
> >>> smell abstract Turing emulations?
> >> In the sense that the Universal Dovetailer generates all possible
> >> dogs
> >> in front of all possible smelling things, but with variate and
> >> relative measure.
> > Does it generate all possible smells as well, and if so, what is the
> > point of going through the formality of generating them?
> Well, that happens, once you assume that 0, 1, 2, 3, ... obeys
> addition and multiplication laws. Notably.
I don't see how addition and mutiplication become olfactory,
especially if they already have all possible olfactory potentials
within them. What would be the point of realizing them in a
simulation? Why does UDA even want to run itself? Is comp curious
about what it already knows?
> >>>>>>>> In that paragraph you are showing that you seem to persist in
> >>>>>>>> displaying the reductionist pre-Gödel-Turing conception of
> >>>>>>>> what
> >>>>>>>> machines are and can be.
> >>>>>>> Not at all. I think that I may understand more than you
> >>>>>>> assume. I
> >>>>>>> agree that 'machine' can be a spiritual term. A self-redefining
> >>>>>>> process which grows and and evolves - but that's only part of
> >>>>>>> what
> >>>>>>> life and consciousness is. The form (or one form) but not the
> >>>>>>> content.
> >>>>>>> It's like electricity without a ground (this kind of ground:
> >>>>>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_%28electricity%29). If it's
> >>>>>>> not
> >>>>>>> anchored in the common reference of literal material in the
> >>>>>>> literal
> >>>>>>> universe - with the unique instantiation coordinates drawn from
> >>>>>>> relation to the singularity, then it's a phantom imposter. A 3-p
> >>>>>>> accounting system imposed upon a compliant-but-dumb 1-p of a
> >>>>>>> semiconductor (or collection of inanimate objects, etc).
> >>>>>> But then you have to explain us what is not Turing emulable in
> >>>>>> those
> >>>>>> processes.
> >>>>> It's the the hole that it makes in the singularity.
> >>>> Give me a proof that such an hole (definition please) is not Turing
> >>>> emulable (nor Turing projectable: that is, a result of the comp
> >>>> first
> >>>> person indeterminacy).
> >>> The hole is the unique identifier of an event which constitutes it's
> >>> sequestration within the singularity.
> >> Define "unique", "event", "sequestration" and "singularity".
> > Unique meaning corresponding to a single instantiation.
> > Event meaning any phenomenon which can be experienced directly or
> > indirectly.
> > Sequestration meaning separation from other potential events.
> > Singularity meaning, the universe minus time and space. The
> > indivisible potential from which all divisible realizations emerge.
> This does not help a lot.
I'm just using the terms in a standard way. Singularity is a little
more specialized, but I think pretty straightforward. It is The
Everything of which we Theorize Of.
> >> What is a "timespace", what is a "signature".
> > Timespace is the container of events. It's the gaps between material
> > objects and the gaps between subjective experiences.
> > Signature is my figurative description of a condensed expression of
> > unique identity.
> >>> composed of sensorimotive mass-energy.
> >> Yu said "sensorimotive" = ontological complement to electromagnetic
> >> relativity
> > Electromagnetic relativity is a description of the phenomenology of
> > mass-energy. Mass energy is what it is, electromagnetism is what it
> > does in groups, and relativity is what groups of electromagnetic
> > groups do.
> > Sensorimotive perception is the ontological complement - the polar
> > opposite - the involuted pseudo-duality of electromagnetic relativity.
> > Sensorimotive phenomena are the experiencers and experiences which
> > comprise the 1-p interior of electromagnetism. Perceptions are the
> > inertial frames or worlds which group experiences and experiencers
> > together and comprises the 1-p interior of relativity.
> >>> of an
> >>> event as a specific energy event and as such cannot be emulated,
> >>> owing
> >>> to the cohesiveness of the singularity. There isn't any other
> >>> place to
> >>> put the hole and have it not be the hole.
> >> ?
> > It's what makes one event different from all other events...it's
> > coordinate of orientation to the ultimate.
> >>>>> A thing's unique
> >>>>> identity in relation to the rest of the universe.
> >>>> Define "universe".
> >>> The total coherence and relation of all perceptions.
> >>>>> I's a MAC address
> >>>>> than cannot be spoofed. Ultimately, a thing 'is what it is' and
> >>>>> not
> >>>>> what just we believe it to be.
> >>>> Which things. You cannot pretend to refute something with statement
> >>>> that vague.
> >>> I don't see how it's vague.
> >> Then you have even more work to do.
> > Call it the Akashic Record if you like.
> >>> I'm saying that everything is uniquely
> >>> instantiated from an absolutely objective perspective.
> >> Why not. This is can be said in comp to, for the 3-p. For the 1p,
> >> this
> >> beg the question.
> > I'm saying that even 3-p supervenes upon the absolute. The absolute
> > would be 0/∞-p.
> On Sep 23, 3:17 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>> On 23 Sep 2011, at 02:42, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>>> It is a comparison made by a third >>> person observer of a human presentation against their expectations >>> of >>> said human presentation. Substitution 'level' similarly implies that >>> there is an objective standard for expectations of humanity. I don't >>> think that there is such a thing.
>> It all depend what you mean by "objective standard".
> That there is some kind of actual set of criteria which make the > difference between human and non human.
You really frighten me. The last time I read something similar was when I read My Kampf by A. Hitler, notably on the handicapped people, homosexual, jews, etc. I don't think there is any criteria. may be a human is just someone having human parents, but then evolution already blur the notion.
> Some apes probably have more > human qualities than some humans,
That's a good point. Animals might be more human than human, like in humanism.
> and some artificial brain extensions > will probably have more human qualities than others. I don't think > that it's likely to be able to replace a significant part of the brain > with digital appliances though.
We know this, but I think this comes from not having a genuine idea of what are universal machines.
> I would compare it with body > prosthetics. An organ here or a limb there, sure, but replacing a > spinal cord or brain stem with something non-biological is probably > not going to work.
The point is that it is possible in principle. No doubt that the brain is a very complex structure, and it might take a long time before we do it. But the fact that we will have to take centuries, or billions of years, or infinity changes nothing. Comp is not the idea that we can or will have artificial brains, but just that the brain is a natural machine. This is my working assumption, and, given that you say it is false/wrong/unplausible, we just ask you why you think so.
>> The technical notion of zombie does not rely on comp. It is just a >> human, acting normally, but which is assumed to be without any inner >> life. Non-comp + current data makes them plausible, which is an >> argument for comp.
> I think that the whole premise is too flawed to be useful in practical > considerations.
The practical thing that you can extract from comp is the infinite spiritual power of *modesty*.
> It posits that there is a such thing as 'acting > normally'. The existence of sociopathy indicates that there are > naturally occurring 'partial zombies' already to the extent that it > means anything, but that the concept or p-zombies itself assumes that > human 'normalcy' can be ascertained by observing moment to moment > behavior rather than over a lifetime. A fully digital person, like > digital music, may satisfy many of the qualities we associate with a > person, but always carry with them a clear inauthenticity which seems > aimless and empty. If they are simulating a person who is already like > that, then it could be said that they have achieved substitution > level, but it's not really a robust test of the principle.
Comp justifies by itself that there are no test.
>>> If you don't assume >>> that substance can be separated from function completely, then there >>> is no meaning to the idea of zombies. It's like dehydrated water.
>> I am rather skeptical on substance. But I tend to believe in waves >> and >> particles, because group theory can explain them. But I don't need >> substance for that. And with comp, ther is no substance that we can >> related, even indirectly, to consciousness. I see the notion of >> substance as the Achilles' heel of the Aristotelian theories.
> But if you are saying that zombies cannot exist,
I am not saying that. I am saying that non-comp + materialism entails bizarre infinities and/or zombies.
> doesn't that mean > that positing a substance that automatically is associated with a > particular set of functions. Otherwise you could just program > something to behave like a zombie.
? To program something acting like a zombie is the same as programming something to behave like a human.
> To say that comp prevents zombies is actually a self-defeating > argument I think.
I might differ a little bit from Stathis on this. It is not clear that comp prevents zombies. Japanese engineers build quite sophisticate dolls for sexual purpose, and we might be in sincere trouble the day they fight for being recognize as living and conscious beings, even if we know they are gifted in simulating (not emulating) feelings. A friend of mine (engineers) to build a little cute dog-robot to feature in one of his piece of theater; The dog was tortured on the scene and crying/whining is a very convincing way. The audience was in shock. It was just almost impossible to not confer to the robot some feeling, despite the extreme simplicity of its program. Fake humans capable of deluding people for some great amount of time cannot be entirely excluded. What I do say, is that non comp entails "real" p- zombies (and/or other more technical absurdities).
> It seems to violate the principle of universal > emulation so that you could not, for instance have one digital person > which was the virtualized slave of another, because the second digital > body would be, in effect, a zombie. This seems to inject a special > case of arbitrary Turing limitation. Consider the example of remote > desktop software, where we can shell out one computer to another. What > happens to the host computer's 'consciousness'? Does it not become a > partial zombie, unable to locally control it's behavior?
In *that* sense, all bodies are zombies. A body is always a construct of minds. This is not obvious, and is related to the fact that comp makes physicalness emerging from consciousness, which emerges from the infinities of number relations.
>>>>> There is no >>>>> substitution 'level', only a ratios of authenticity.
>>>> ?
>>> Say a plastic plant is 100% authentic at a distance of 50 years by >>> the >>> naked eye, but 20% likely to be deemed authentic at a distance of >>> three feet. Some people have better eyesight. Some are more familiar >>> with plants. Some are paying more attention. Some are on >>> hallucinogens, etc There is no substitution level at which a plastic >>> plant functions 100% as a plant from all possible observers through >>> all time and not actually be a genuine plant. Substitution as a >>> concrete existential reality is a myth. It's just a question of >>> arbitrarily fixing an acceptable set of perceptions by particular >>> categories of observers and taking it for functional equivalence.
>> An entity suffering in a box, does suffer, independently of any >> observers.
> A box can contain a body, but it's not clear that it can contain the > experience with that body. Sensory isolation in humans leads to rapid > escape into the imagining psyche. But if you want to stick with a flat > read of the example, we could say that the box is an observer, at > least to the extent that it's existence must resist the escape of the > trapped entity.
My point is that we don't need to observe a brain for a consciousness existing in relation with that brain.
>>>>> The closer your >>>>> substitute is to native human sensemaking material, the more of >>>>> the >>>>> brain can be replaced with it, but with diminishing returns at >>>>> high >>>>> levels so that complete replacement would not be desirable.
>>>> That is even worst. This entails partial zombies. It does not make >>>> sense. I remind you that zombie, by definition, cannot be seen as >>>> such >>>> by their behavior at all.
>>> That's the theoretical description of a zombie. Like dehydrated >>> water. >>> In reality, one observer's zombie is another observer's non-descript >>> stranger in the park. There is no validity to these observations >>> relative to the would-be zombie's quality of subjectivity.
>> We are always talking in a theory. Reality is what we search.
> My point was that zombies as they are described cannot exist, and that > the real world principle the device of zombiehood is intended to > defeat is not even addressed.
?
>> We better use the contemporary image to help people see the validity >> of argument, but I could reason with clock-wheels like machine. The >> key point is the mathematical notion of universality (for >> computation).
> It would be more interesting to use the clock-wheel version so that > people could see the invalidity of the argument ;)
That is like Ned Block type of argument. If consciousness supervene on a brain in virtue of being a computer, then it must supervene on any bizarre implementation of that brain (like the chinese people sending 0 and 1 to each others). This just prove nothing.
>>>>>> Everyone agree that if the level is infinitely low, then current >>>>>> physics is false. To speculate that physics is false for making >>>>>> machine stupid is a bit of far stretching.
>>>>> Physics isn't false, it's just incomplete.
>>>> No, it has to false for making the substitution level infinitely >>>> low. >>>> *ALL* theories, including the many one trying to marry gravitation >>>> and >>>> the quantum entails its Turing emulability.
>>> The substitution level isn't infinitely low, it's just not >>> applicable >>> at all. There is no substitution level of white for black, lead for >>> gold, up for down, etc. I doubt the objective existence of >>> 'substitution'. Substitution is an interpretation - not >>> necessarily a >>> voluntary one, but an interpretation nonetheless.
>> So, what will you say if your daughter accept an artificial brain?
On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 5:24 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Do you agree or don't you that the observable (or public, or third >> person) behaviour of neurons can be entirely explained in terms of a >> chain of physical events?
> No, nothing can be *entirely* explained in terms of a chain of > physical events in the way that you assume physical events occur. > Physical events are a shared experiences, dependent upon the > perceptual capabilities and choices of the participants in them. That > is not to say we that the behavior of neurons can't be *adequately* > explained for specific purposes: medical, biochemical, > electromagnetic, etc.
OK, so you agree that the *observable* behaviour of neurons can be adequately explained in terms of a chain of physical events. The neurons won't do anything that is apparently magical, right?
>> At times you have said that thoughts, over >> and above physical events, have an influence on neuronal behaviour. >> For an observer (who has no access to whatever subjectivity the >> neurons may have) that would mean that neurons sometimes fire >> apparently without any trigger, since if thoughts are the trigger this >> is not observable.
> No. Thoughts are not the trigger of physical events, they are the > experiential correlate of the physical events. It is the sense that > the two phenomenologies make together that is the trigger.
>> If, on the other hand, neurons do not fire in the >> absence of physical stimuli (which may have associated with them >> subjectivity - the observer cannot know this)
> We know that for example, gambling affects the physical behavior of > the amygdala. What physical force do you posit that emanates from > 'gambling' that penetrates the skull and blood brain barrier to > mobilize those neurons?
The skull has various holes in it (the foramen magnum, the orbits, foramina for the cranial nerves) through which sense data from the environment enters and, via a series of neural relays, reaches the amygdala and other parts of the brain.
>> But if thoughts influence behaviour and thoughts are not observed, >> then observation of a brain would show things happening contrary to >> physical laws,
> No. Thought are not observed by an MRI. An MRI can only show the > physical shadow of the experiences taking place.
That's right, so everything that can be observed in the brain (or in the body in general) has an observable cause.
>>such as neurons apparently firing for no reason, i.e. >> magically. You haven't clearly refuted this, perhaps because you can >> see it would result in a mechanistic brain.
> No, I have refuted it over and over and over and over and over. You > aren't listening to me, you are stuck in your own cognitive loop. > Please don't accuse me of this again until you have a better > understanding of what I mean what I'm saying about the relationship > between gambling and the amygdala.
> "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we > created them" - A. Einstein.
You have not answered it. You have contradicted yourself by saying we *don't* observe the brain doing things contrary to physics and we *do* observe the brain doing things contrary to physics. You seem to believe that neurons in the amygdala will fire spontaneously when the subject thinks about gambling, which would be magic. Neurons only fire in response to a physical stimulus. That the physical stimulus has associated qualia is not observable: a scientist would see the neuron firing, explain why it fired in physical terms, and then wonder as an afterthought if the neuron "felt" anything while it was firing.
>> A neuron has a limited number of duties: to fire if it sees a certain >> potential difference across its cell membrane or a certain >> concentration of neurotransmitter.
> That is a gross reductionist mispresentation of neurology. You are > giving the brain less functionality than mold. Tell me, how does this > conversation turn into cell membrane potentials or neurotransmitters?
Clearly, it does, since this conversation occurs when the neurons in our brains are active. The important functionality of the neurons is the action potential, since that triggers other neurons and ultimately muscle. The complex cellular apparatus in the neuron is there to allow this process to happen, as the complex cellular apparatus in the thyroid is to enable secretion of thyroxine. An artificial thyroid that measured TSH levels and secreted thyroxine accordingly could replace the thyroid gland even though it was nothing like the original organ in structure.
>>That's all that has to be >> simulated. A neuron doesn't have one response for when, say, the >> central bank raises interest rates and another response for when it >> lowers interest rates; all it does is respond to what its neighbours >> in the network are doing, and because of the complexity of the >> network, a small change in input can cause a large change in overall >> brain behaviour.
> So if I move my arm, that's because the neurons that have nothing to > do with my arm must have caused the ones that do relate to my arm to > fire? And 'I' think that I move 'my arm' because why exactly?
The neurons are connected in a network. If I see something relating to the economy that may lead me to move my arm to make an online bank account transaction. Obviously there has to be some causal connection between my arm and the information about the economy. How do you imagine that it happens?
> If the brain of even a flea were anywhere remotely close to the > simplistic goofiness that you describe, we should have figured out > human consciousness completely 200 years ago.
Even the brain of a flea is very complex. The brain of the nematode C elegans is the simplest brain we know, and although we have the anatomy of its neurons and their connections, no adequate computer simulation exists because we do not know the strength of the connections.
>> In theory we can simulate something perfectly if its behaviour is >> computable, in practice we can't but we try to simulate it >> sufficiently accurately. The brain has a level of engineering >> tolerance, or you would experience radical mental state changes every >> time you shook your head. So the simulation doesn't have to get it >> exactly right down to the quantum level.
> Why would you experience a 'radical' mental state change? Why not just > an appropriate mental state change? Likewise your simulation will > experience an appropriate mental state to what is being used > materially to simulate it.
There is a certain level of tolerance in every physical object we might want to simulate. We need to know a lot about it, but we don't need accuracy down to the position of every atom, for if the brain were so delicately balanced it would malfunction with the slightest perturbation.
>> My point was that even a simulation of a very simple nervous system >> produces such a fantastic degree of complexity that it is impossible >> to know what it will do until you actually run the program. It is, >> like the weather, unpredictable and surprising even though it is >> deterministic.
> There is still no link between predictability and intentionality. You > might be able to predict what I'm going to order from a menu at a > restaurant, but that doesn't mean that I'm not choosing it. You might > not be able to predict a tsunami, but that doesn't mean it's because > the tsunami is choosing to do something. The difference, I think, has > to do with more experiential depth in between each input and output.
Whether something is conscious or not has nothing to do with whether it is deterministic or predictable.
>> > I understand perfectly why you think this argument works, but you >> > seemingly don't understand that my explanations and examples refute >> > your false dichotomy. Just as a rule of thumb, anytime someone says >> > something like "The only way out of this (meaning their) conclusion " >> > My assessment is that their mind is frozen in a defensive state and >> > cannot accept new information.
>> You have agreed (sort of) that partial zombies are absurd
> No. Stuffed animals are partial zombies to young children. It's a > linguistic failure to describe reality truthfully, not an insight into > the truth of consciousness.
This statement shows that you haven't understood what a partial zombie is. It is a conscious being which lacks consciousness in a particular modality, such as visual perception or language processing, but does not notice that anything is abnormal and presents no external evidence that anything is abnormal. You have said a few posts back that you think this is absurd: when you're conscious, you know you're conscious.
>>and you have >> agreed (sort of) that the brain does not do things contrary to >> physics. But if consciousness is substrate-dependent, it would allow >> for the creation of partial zombies. This is a logical problem. You >> have not explained how to avoid it.
> Consciousness is not substrate-dependent, it is substrate descriptive. > A partial zombie is just a misunderstanding of prognosia. A character > in a computer game is a partial zombie.
A character in a computer game is not a partial zombie as defined above. And what's prognosia? Do you mean agnosia, the inability to recognise certain types of objects? That is not a partial zombie either, since it affects behaviour and the patient is often aware of the deficit.
>> Would it count as "internal motives" if the circuit were partly >> controlled by thermal noise, which in most circuits we try to >> eliminate? If the circuit were partly controlled by noise it would >> behave unpredictably (although it would still be following physical >> laws which could be described probabilistically). A free will >> incompatibilist could then say that the circuit acted of its own free >> will. I'm not sure that would satisfy you, but then I don't know
> > On Sep 23, 3:17 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> >> On 23 Sep 2011, at 02:42, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> >>> It is a comparison made by a third
> >>> person observer of a human presentation against their expectations
> >>> of
> >>> said human presentation. Substitution 'level' similarly implies that
> >>> there is an objective standard for expectations of humanity. I don't
> >>> think that there is such a thing.
> >> It all depend what you mean by "objective standard".
> > That there is some kind of actual set of criteria which make the
> > difference between human and non human.
> You really frighten me. The last time I read something similar was
> when I read My Kampf by A. Hitler, notably on the handicapped people,
> homosexual, jews, etc.
But I'm the one saying that there isn't a substitution level. You've
been the one telling me that there must be. I'm saying that we are
both mechanical and non-mechanical, but you are saying that all non-
mechanical must be reducible to the consequences of mechanism. That
sounds much more like epistemological fascism to me.
> I don't think there is any criteria. may be a human is just someone
> having human parents, but then evolution already blur the notion.
> > Some apes probably have more
> > human qualities than some humans,
> That's a good point. Animals might be more human than human, like in
> humanism.
> > and some artificial brain extensions
> > will probably have more human qualities than others. I don't think
> > that it's likely to be able to replace a significant part of the brain
> > with digital appliances though.
> We know this, but I think this comes from not having a genuine idea of
> what are universal machines.
> > I would compare it with body
> > prosthetics. An organ here or a limb there, sure, but replacing a
> > spinal cord or brain stem with something non-biological is probably
> > not going to work.
> The point is that it is possible in principle. No doubt that the brain
> is a very complex structure, and it might take a long time before we
> do it. But the fact that we will have to take centuries, or billions
> of years, or infinity changes nothing. Comp is not the idea that we
> can or will have artificial brains, but just that the brain is a
> natural machine. This is my working assumption, and, given that you
> say it is false/wrong/unplausible, we just ask you why you think so.
It's wrong because the brain is only the frontier where we begin and
the body ends. What we can observe the brain doing is not an adequate
recipe for creating 1-p consciousness in all possible worlds. It's not
a direct correlation, just as yellow is not a direct result of the
frequency wavelength range of the visible spectrum which it correlates
to. The brain is the common sense of what we are and the psyche is the
uncommon sense of what we are. They overlap through their sharing of
sense, and through their symmetrical divergence from each other, and
they underlap through their separate developmental encounters through
chance.
If you build a brain based upon only the common sense without
factoring in the symmetrical divergence and the underlapping non-
sense, then I think that you get a device with all of the capability
to feel and think as a complicated alarm clock.
> >> The technical notion of zombie does not rely on comp. It is just a
> >> human, acting normally, but which is assumed to be without any inner
> >> life. Non-comp + current data makes them plausible, which is an
> >> argument for comp.
> > I think that the whole premise is too flawed to be useful in practical
> > considerations.
> The practical thing that you can extract from comp is the infinite
> spiritual power of *modesty*.
?
> > It posits that there is a such thing as 'acting
> > normally'. The existence of sociopathy indicates that there are
> > naturally occurring 'partial zombies' already to the extent that it
> > means anything, but that the concept or p-zombies itself assumes that
> > human 'normalcy' can be ascertained by observing moment to moment
> > behavior rather than over a lifetime. A fully digital person, like
> > digital music, may satisfy many of the qualities we associate with a
> > person, but always carry with them a clear inauthenticity which seems
> > aimless and empty. If they are simulating a person who is already like
> > that, then it could be said that they have achieved substitution
> > level, but it's not really a robust test of the principle.
> Comp justifies by itself that there are no test.
This is the problem. It assumes that just because there is no test to
prove we feel, that in fact feeling is no different from computing.
It's a fair theoretical-philosophical proposition, but it insists upon
a flat computational read of reality to begin with, thus disqualifying
any possibility for 1-p authority.
> >>> If you don't assume
> >>> that substance can be separated from function completely, then there
> >>> is no meaning to the idea of zombies. It's like dehydrated water.
> >> I am rather skeptical on substance. But I tend to believe in waves
> >> and
> >> particles, because group theory can explain them. But I don't need
> >> substance for that. And with comp, ther is no substance that we can
> >> related, even indirectly, to consciousness. I see the notion of
> >> substance as the Achilles' heel of the Aristotelian theories.
> > But if you are saying that zombies cannot exist,
> I am not saying that. I am saying that non-comp + materialism entails
> bizarre infinities and/or zombies.
> > doesn't that mean
> > that positing a substance that automatically is associated with a
> > particular set of functions. Otherwise you could just program
> > something to behave like a zombie.
> ?
> To program something acting like a zombie is the same as programming
> something to behave like a human.
So to be human really is to be a zombie, but to hallucinate that you
are not?
> > To say that comp prevents zombies is actually a self-defeating
> > argument I think.
> I might differ a little bit from Stathis on this. It is not clear that
> comp prevents zombies.
> Japanese engineers build quite sophisticate dolls for sexual purpose,
> and we might be in sincere trouble the day they fight for being
> recognize as living and conscious beings, even if we know they are
> gifted in simulating (not emulating) feelings.
> A friend of mine (engineers) to build a little cute dog-robot to
> feature in one of his piece of theater; The dog was tortured on the
> scene and crying/whining is a very convincing way. The audience was in
> shock. It was just almost impossible to not confer to the robot some
> feeling, despite the extreme simplicity of its program. Fake humans
> capable of deluding people for some great amount of time cannot be
> entirely excluded. What I do say, is that non comp entails "real" p-
> zombies (and/or other more technical absurdities).
I get that. You allow that a robot dog is going to engender human
sentimental projections, but you are saying that a sufficiently
sophisticated dogdroid should not be excluded from the possibility of
having actual feelings worthy of sentiment. I would disagree that
sophistication of design alone is going to make that difference, but
it's not to say that there is not some elevated range of our
consciousness at which that might not be true. In psychedelic states
and through monastic practices, it is not out of the question that the
sanctity of human life extends not only to vegan lifestyles and non-
violence, but perhaps a saintly reverence for all coherent structures
and pattens, even programs. I don't know if I personally am ready to
accept responsibility not to step on any nanobots, but I understand
that it's possible in principle. The problem is, at that level of non-
attachment to your native identity, who determines whether or not a
chainsaw has the right of way over someone's neck? What if I have a
great expensive machine that happens to enjoy running over people? Who
am I to say that it doesn't have the right to express itself?
> > It seems to violate the principle of universal
> > emulation so that you could not, for instance have one digital person
> > which was the virtualized slave of another, because the second digital
> > body would be, in effect, a zombie. This seems to inject a special
> > case of arbitrary Turing limitation. Consider the example of remote
> > desktop software, where we can shell out one computer to another. What
> > happens to the host computer's 'consciousness'? Does it not become a
> > partial zombie, unable to locally control it's behavior?
> In *that* sense, all bodies are zombies. A body is always a construct
> of minds. This is not obvious, and is related to the fact that comp
> makes physicalness emerging from consciousness, which emerges from the
> infinities of number relations.
If all bodies are zombies, then non-comp + materialism would seem to
be a foregone conclusion. It seems like you are making zombies and
infinities bad when you want to scare us but good when they are the
inevitable result of arithmetic.
> >>>>> There is no
> >>>>> substitution 'level', only a ratios of authenticity.
> >>>> ?
> >>> Say a plastic plant is 100% authentic at a distance of 50 years by
> >>> the
> >>> naked eye, but 20% likely to be deemed authentic at a distance of
> >>> three feet. Some people have better eyesight. Some are more familiar
> >>> with plants. Some are paying more attention.
> On Sep 25, 10:33 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: >> On 25 Sep 2011, at 02:51, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>>> (next installment)
>>> On Sep 23, 3:17 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>>>> On 23 Sep 2011, at 02:42, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>>>>> It is a comparison made by a third >>>>> person observer of a human presentation against their expectations >>>>> of >>>>> said human presentation. Substitution 'level' similarly implies >>>>> that >>>>> there is an objective standard for expectations of humanity. I >>>>> don't >>>>> think that there is such a thing.
>>>> It all depend what you mean by "objective standard".
>>> That there is some kind of actual set of criteria which make the >>> difference between human and non human.
>> You really frighten me. The last time I read something similar was >> when I read My Kampf by A. Hitler, notably on the handicapped people, >> homosexual, jews, etc.
> But I'm the one saying that there isn't a substitution level. > You've > been the one telling me that there must be.
So you are the one saying that a human with a prosthetic brain is no more human.
> I'm saying that we are > both mechanical and non-mechanical,
That is a contradiction. Would you say "yes and no" to the doctor?
> but you are saying that all non- > mechanical must be reducible to the consequences of mechanism. That > sounds much more like epistemological fascism to me.
The 3-I is mechanical (comp assumption), and the 1-I is not (consequence). Why postulate something when we can derive it from simpler assumption. It is not fascism, it is Occam razor.
>> I don't think there is any criteria. may be a human is just someone >> having human parents, but then evolution already blur the notion.
>>> Some apes probably have more >>> human qualities than some humans,
>> That's a good point. Animals might be more human than human, like in >> humanism.
>>> and some artificial brain extensions >>> will probably have more human qualities than others. I don't think >>> that it's likely to be able to replace a significant part of the >>> brain >>> with digital appliances though.
>> We know this, but I think this comes from not having a genuine idea >> of >> what are universal machines.
>>> I would compare it with body >>> prosthetics. An organ here or a limb there, sure, but replacing a >>> spinal cord or brain stem with something non-biological is probably >>> not going to work.
>> The point is that it is possible in principle. No doubt that the >> brain >> is a very complex structure, and it might take a long time before we >> do it. But the fact that we will have to take centuries, or billions >> of years, or infinity changes nothing. Comp is not the idea that we >> can or will have artificial brains, but just that the brain is a >> natural machine. This is my working assumption, and, given that you >> say it is false/wrong/unplausible, we just ask you why you think so.
> It's wrong because the brain is only the frontier where we begin and > the body ends. What we can observe the brain doing is not an adequate > recipe for creating 1-p consciousness in all possible worlds. It's not > a direct correlation, just as yellow is not a direct result of the > frequency wavelength range of the visible spectrum which it correlates > to.
I agree. This follows from comp. but the artifical brain can do as much as the biological brain in making possible for a genuine consciousness to manifest itself locally. The 1-p related to that brain will have its "futures" deterline by the statistics on all computations though.
> The brain is the common sense of what we are and the psyche is the > uncommon sense of what we are. They overlap through their sharing of > sense, and through their symmetrical divergence from each other, and > they underlap through their separate developmental encounters through > chance.
Perhaps. But not relevant to negate comp.
> If you build a brain based upon only the common sense without > factoring in the symmetrical divergence and the underlapping non- > sense, then I think that you get a device with all of the capability > to feel and think as a complicated alarm clock.
You beg the question. you just say: my personal opinion is that a brain is not a machine.
>>>> The technical notion of zombie does not rely on comp. It is just a >>>> human, acting normally, but which is assumed to be without any >>>> inner >>>> life. Non-comp + current data makes them plausible, which is an >>>> argument for comp.
>>> I think that the whole premise is too flawed to be useful in >>> practical >>> considerations.
>> The practical thing that you can extract from comp is the infinite >> spiritual power of *modesty*.
> ?
>>> It posits that there is a such thing as 'acting >>> normally'. The existence of sociopathy indicates that there are >>> naturally occurring 'partial zombies' already to the extent that it >>> means anything, but that the concept or p-zombies itself assumes >>> that >>> human 'normalcy' can be ascertained by observing moment to moment >>> behavior rather than over a lifetime. A fully digital person, like >>> digital music, may satisfy many of the qualities we associate with a >>> person, but always carry with them a clear inauthenticity which >>> seems >>> aimless and empty. If they are simulating a person who is already >>> like >>> that, then it could be said that they have achieved substitution >>> level, but it's not really a robust test of the principle.
>> Comp justifies by itself that there are no test.
> This is the problem. It assumes that just because there is no test to > prove we feel,
Not at all. Comp justifies it in the sense that it is a logical consequence. No assumptions are needed above CT+YD. (Church thesis + "yes doctor").
> that in fact feeling is no different from computing.
This shows you have not study the paper. Computating is given by the Bp (with p sigma_1). feelings are given by Bp & Dt & p, with p sigma_1. This obeys quite different logics.
> It's a fair theoretical-philosophical proposition, but it insists upon > a flat computational read of reality to begin with, thus disqualifying > any possibility for 1-p authority.
"1p-authority" is preserved and explained by all modalities with "& p" (S4Grz, x, x*, x1, x1*).
>>>>> If you don't assume >>>>> that substance can be separated from function completely, then >>>>> there >>>>> is no meaning to the idea of zombies. It's like dehydrated water.
>>>> I am rather skeptical on substance. But I tend to believe in waves >>>> and >>>> particles, because group theory can explain them. But I don't need >>>> substance for that. And with comp, ther is no substance that we can >>>> related, even indirectly, to consciousness. I see the notion of >>>> substance as the Achilles' heel of the Aristotelian theories.
>>> But if you are saying that zombies cannot exist,
>> I am not saying that. I am saying that non-comp + materialism entails >> bizarre infinities and/or zombies.
>>> doesn't that mean >>> that positing a substance that automatically is associated with a >>> particular set of functions. Otherwise you could just program >>> something to behave like a zombie.
>> ? >> To program something acting like a zombie is the same as programming >> something to behave like a human.
> So to be human really is to be a zombie, but to hallucinate that you > are not?
This does not follow. What I said is a direct consequence of the definition of zombie. It does not follow that human are zombie. It suggests that a program behaving like a human is NOT a zombie. But with non-comp, zombie can make sense.
>>> To say that comp prevents zombies is actually a self-defeating >>> argument I think.
>> I might differ a little bit from Stathis on this. It is not clear >> that >> comp prevents zombies. >> Japanese engineers build quite sophisticate dolls for sexual purpose, >> and we might be in sincere trouble the day they fight for being >> recognize as living and conscious beings, even if we know they are >> gifted in simulating (not emulating) feelings. >> A friend of mine (engineers) to build a little cute dog-robot to >> feature in one of his piece of theater; The dog was tortured on the >> scene and crying/whining is a very convincing way. The audience was >> in >> shock. It was just almost impossible to not confer to the robot some >> feeling, despite the extreme simplicity of its program. Fake humans >> capable of deluding people for some great amount of time cannot be >> entirely excluded. What I do say, is that non comp entails "real" p- >> zombies (and/or other more technical absurdities).
> I get that. You allow that a robot dog is going to engender human > sentimental projections, but you are saying that a sufficiently > sophisticated dogdroid should not be excluded from the possibility of > having actual feelings worthy of sentiment. I would disagree that > sophistication of design alone is going to make that difference, but > it's not to say that there is not some elevated range of our > consciousness at which that might not be true. In psychedelic states > and through monastic practices, it is not out of the question that the > sanctity of human life extends not only to vegan lifestyles and non- > violence, but perhaps a saintly reverence for all coherent structures > and pattens, even programs. I don't know if I personally am ready to > accept responsibility not to step on any nanobots, but I understand > that it's possible in principle. The problem is, at that level of non- > attachment to your native identity, who determines whether or not a > chainsaw has the right of way over someone's neck? What if I
> On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 5:24 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Do you agree or don't you that the observable (or public, or third
> >> person) behaviour of neurons can be entirely explained in terms of a
> >> chain of physical events?
> > No, nothing can be *entirely* explained in terms of a chain of
> > physical events in the way that you assume physical events occur.
> > Physical events are a shared experiences, dependent upon the
> > perceptual capabilities and choices of the participants in them. That
> > is not to say we that the behavior of neurons can't be *adequately*
> > explained for specific purposes: medical, biochemical,
> > electromagnetic, etc.
> OK, so you agree that the *observable* behaviour of neurons can be
> adequately explained in terms of a chain of physical events. The
> neurons won't do anything that is apparently magical, right?
Are not all of our observations observable behaviors of neurons?
You're not understanding how I think observation works. There is no
such thing as an observable behavior, it's always a matter of
observable how, and by who? If you limit your observation of how
neurons behave to what can be detected by a series of metal probes or
microscopic antenna, then you are getting a radically limited view of
what neurons are and what they do. You are asking a blind man what the
Mona Lisa looks like by having him touch the paint, then making a
careful impression of his fingers, and then announcing that the Mona
Lisa can only do what fingerpainting can do, and that inferring
anything beyond the nature of plain old paint to the Mona Lisa is
magical. No. It doesn't work that way. A universe where nothing more
than paint exists has no capacity to describe an intentional, higher
level representation through a medium of paint. The dynamics of paint
alone do not describe their important but largely irrelevant role to
creating the image.
> >> At times you have said that thoughts, over
> >> and above physical events, have an influence on neuronal behaviour.
> >> For an observer (who has no access to whatever subjectivity the
> >> neurons may have) that would mean that neurons sometimes fire
> >> apparently without any trigger, since if thoughts are the trigger this
> >> is not observable.
> > No. Thoughts are not the trigger of physical events, they are the
> > experiential correlate of the physical events. It is the sense that
> > the two phenomenologies make together that is the trigger.
> >> If, on the other hand, neurons do not fire in the
> >> absence of physical stimuli (which may have associated with them
> >> subjectivity - the observer cannot know this)
> > We know that for example, gambling affects the physical behavior of
> > the amygdala. What physical force do you posit that emanates from
> > 'gambling' that penetrates the skull and blood brain barrier to
> > mobilize those neurons?
> The skull has various holes in it (the foramen magnum, the orbits,
> foramina for the cranial nerves) through which sense data from the
> environment enters and, via a series of neural relays, reaches the
> amygdala and other parts of the brain.
What is 'sense data' made of and how does it get into 'gambling'?
> >> But if thoughts influence behaviour and thoughts are not observed,
> >> then observation of a brain would show things happening contrary to
> >> physical laws,
> > No. Thought are not observed by an MRI. An MRI can only show the
> > physical shadow of the experiences taking place.
> That's right, so everything that can be observed in the brain (or in
> the body in general) has an observable cause.
Not at all. The amygdala's response to gambling cannot be observed on
an MRI. We can only infer such a cause because we a priori understand
the experience of gambling. If we did not, of course we could not
infer any kind of association with neural patterns of firing with
something like 'winning a big pot in video poker'. That brain activity
is not a chain reaction from some other part of the brain. The brain
is actually responding to the sense that the mind is making of the
outside world and how it relates to the self. It is not going to be
predictable from whatever the amygala happens to be doing five seconds
or five hours before the win.
> >>such as neurons apparently firing for no reason, i.e.
> >> magically. You haven't clearly refuted this, perhaps because you can
> >> see it would result in a mechanistic brain.
> > No, I have refuted it over and over and over and over and over. You
> > aren't listening to me, you are stuck in your own cognitive loop.
> > Please don't accuse me of this again until you have a better
> > understanding of what I mean what I'm saying about the relationship
> > between gambling and the amygdala.
> > "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we
> > created them" - A. Einstein.
> You have not answered it. You have contradicted yourself by saying we
> *don't* observe the brain doing things contrary to physics and we *do*
> observe the brain doing things contrary to physics.
We don't observe the Mona Lisa doing things contrary to the properties
of paint, but we do observe the Mona Lisa as a higher order experience
manifested through paint. It's the same thing. Physics doesn't explain
the psyche, but psyche uses the physical brain in the ordinary
physical ways that the brain can be used.
>You seem to
> believe that neurons in the amygdala will fire spontaneously when the
> subject thinks about gambling, which would be magic.
You don't understand that you are arguing against neuroscience and
common sense. Of course you can manually control your electrochemical
circuits with thought. That's what all thinking is. It's not that the
amygdala fires spontaneously, it's that the thrills and chills of
risktaking *are* the firing of the amygdala. You seem to be saying
that the brain has our entire life planned out for us in advance as
some kind of meaningless encephalographic housekeeping exercise where
we have no ability to make ourselves horny by thinking about sex or
hungry by thinking about food, no capacity to do or say things based
upon the realities outside of our skull rather than the inside.
>Neurons only fire
> in response to a physical stimulus.
Absurd. Is there a physical difference between a letter written in
Chinese and one written in English...some sort of magic neurochemical
that wafts off of the Chinese ink that prevents my cortex from parsing
the characters?
> That the physical stimulus has
> associated qualia is not observable:
> a scientist would see the neuron
> firing, explain why it fired in physical terms, and then wonder as an
> afterthought if the neuron "felt" anything while it was firing.
Which is why that approach is doomed to failure. There is no point to
the brain other than to help process qualia. Very little of the brain
is required for a body to survive. Insects have brains, and they
survive quite well.
> >> A neuron has a limited number of duties: to fire if it sees a certain
> >> potential difference across its cell membrane or a certain
> >> concentration of neurotransmitter.
> > That is a gross reductionist mispresentation of neurology. You are
> > giving the brain less functionality than mold. Tell me, how does this
> > conversation turn into cell membrane potentials or neurotransmitters?
> Clearly, it does, since this conversation occurs when the neurons in
> our brains are active.
My God. You are unbelievable. I give you a straightforward, unarguably
obvious example of a phenomenon which obviously has absolutely nothing
to do with cellular biology but is nonetheless controlling the
behavior of neurological cells, and you answer that that it must be
biological anyways. Your position, literally, is that 'I can't be
wrong, because I already know that I am right.'
>The important functionality of the neurons is
> the action potential, since that triggers other neurons and ultimately
> muscle. The complex cellular apparatus in the neuron is there to allow
> this process to happen, as the complex cellular apparatus in the
> thyroid is to enable secretion of thyroxine. An artificial thyroid
> that measured TSH levels and secreted thyroxine accordingly could
> replace the thyroid gland even though it was nothing like the original
> organ in structure.
But you have no idea what triggers the action potentials in the first
place other than other action potentials. This makes us completely
incapable of any kind of awareness of the outside world. You are
mistaking the steering wheel for the driver.
> >>That's all that has to be
> >> simulated. A neuron doesn't have one response for when, say, the
> >> central bank raises interest rates and another response for when it
> >> lowers interest rates; all it does is respond to what its neighbours
> >> in the network are doing, and because of the complexity of the
> >> network, a small change in input can cause a large change in overall
> >> brain behaviour.
> > So if I move my arm, that's because the neurons that have nothing to
> > do with my arm must have caused the ones that do relate to my arm to
> > fire? And 'I' think that I move 'my arm' because why exactly?
> The neurons are connected in a network. If I see something relating to
> the economy that may lead me to move my arm to make an online bank
> account transaction.
What is 'I' and how does it physically create action potentials? The
whole time you are telling me that only neurons can trigger other
neurons, and now you want to invoke 'I'? Does I follow the laws of
physics or is it magic? Which is it? Does 'I' do anything that cannot
be explained by action potentials and
...
On Sep 25, 7:39 pm, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> But if thoughts influence behaviour and thoughts are not observed,
> >> then observation of a brain would show things happening contrary to
> >> physical laws,
If you only look at the leaves and horses, nothing unusual is going
on. It is not physics that makes consciousness invisible, it is our
desire to use physics to insist that reality fit into our narrowest
expectations.
On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: >> OK, so you agree that the *observable* behaviour of neurons can be >> adequately explained in terms of a chain of physical events. The >> neurons won't do anything that is apparently magical, right?
> Are not all of our observations observable behaviors of neurons? > You're not understanding how I think observation works. There is no > such thing as an observable behavior, it's always a matter of > observable how, and by who? If you limit your observation of how > neurons behave to what can be detected by a series of metal probes or > microscopic antenna, then you are getting a radically limited view of > what neurons are and what they do. You are asking a blind man what the > Mona Lisa looks like by having him touch the paint, then making a > careful impression of his fingers, and then announcing that the Mona > Lisa can only do what fingerpainting can do, and that inferring > anything beyond the nature of plain old paint to the Mona Lisa is > magical. No. It doesn't work that way. A universe where nothing more > than paint exists has no capacity to describe an intentional, higher > level representation through a medium of paint. The dynamics of paint > alone do not describe their important but largely irrelevant role to > creating the image.
Observable behaviours of neurons include things such as ion gates opening, neurotransmitter release at the synapse and action potential propagation down the axon. I know there may also be non-observables, but I'm only asking about the observables. Do you agree that if a non-observable causes a change in an observable, that would be like magic from the point of view of a scientist?
>> > We know that for example, gambling affects the physical behavior of >> > the amygdala. What physical force do you posit that emanates from >> > 'gambling' that penetrates the skull and blood brain barrier to >> > mobilize those neurons?
>> The skull has various holes in it (the foramen magnum, the orbits, >> foramina for the cranial nerves) through which sense data from the >> environment enters and, via a series of neural relays, reaches the >> amygdala and other parts of the brain.
> What is 'sense data' made of and how does it get into 'gambling'?
Sense data could be the sight and sound of a poker machine, which gets into the brain, is processed in a complex way, and is understood to be "gambling".
> Not at all. The amygdala's response to gambling cannot be observed on > an MRI. We can only infer such a cause because we a priori understand > the experience of gambling. If we did not, of course we could not > infer any kind of association with neural patterns of firing with > something like 'winning a big pot in video poker'. That brain activity > is not a chain reaction from some other part of the brain. The brain > is actually responding to the sense that the mind is making of the > outside world and how it relates to the self. It is not going to be > predictable from whatever the amygala happens to be doing five seconds > or five hours before the win.
The amygdala's response is visible on a fMRI, which is how we know about it. We can infer this without knowing anything about either gambling or the brain, noticing that input A (the poker machine) is consistently followed by output B (the amygdala lighting up on fMRI).
>> You have not answered it. You have contradicted yourself by saying we >> *don't* observe the brain doing things contrary to physics and we *do* >> observe the brain doing things contrary to physics.
> We don't observe the Mona Lisa doing things contrary to the properties > of paint, but we do observe the Mona Lisa as a higher order experience > manifested through paint. It's the same thing. Physics doesn't explain > the psyche, but psyche uses the physical brain in the ordinary > physical ways that the brain can be used.
But the Mona Lisa does not move of its own accord. That is what it would have to do for the situation to be analogous to brain changes occurring due to mental processes and not physical processes.
>>You seem to >> believe that neurons in the amygdala will fire spontaneously when the >> subject thinks about gambling, which would be magic.
> You don't understand that you are arguing against neuroscience and > common sense. Of course you can manually control your electrochemical > circuits with thought. That's what all thinking is. It's not that the > amygdala fires spontaneously, it's that the thrills and chills of > risktaking *are* the firing of the amygdala. You seem to be saying > that the brain has our entire life planned out for us in advance as > some kind of meaningless encephalographic housekeeping exercise where > we have no ability to make ourselves horny by thinking about sex or > hungry by thinking about food, no capacity to do or say things based > upon the realities outside of our skull rather than the inside.
I'm not sure if you're not understanding or just pretending not to understand. Take any neuron in the brain: it fires due to the influences of the surrounding neurons, and each of those neurons fires due to the influence of the neurons surrounding it, and so on, accounting for all the neurons in the brain. These are the third person observable effects; associated with (or identical to, or another aspect of, or supervening on, or a side-effect of - it doesn't change the argument) this observable activity are the thoughts and feelings. A scientist cannot see the thoughts and feelings, since they are non-observable. The non-observable thoughts and feelings cannot affect the observable physical activity, for if they could, the scientist would see apparently magical events. We can still say that thought A leads to feeling B, but what the scientist observes is that brain state A' (associated with thought A) leads to brain state B' (associated with feeling B). So although we can tell the story of the person in terms of thoughts and feelings, the scientist can tell the same story in terms of biochemical events. If the scientist understands the biochemistry then in theory he will be able to predict everything the person will do (or write probabilistic equations if truly random effects are significant in the brain), although in practice due to the complexity of the system this would be very difficult.
>>Neurons only fire >> in response to a physical stimulus.
> Absurd. Is there a physical difference between a letter written in > Chinese and one written in English...some sort of magic neurochemical > that wafts off of the Chinese ink that prevents my cortex from parsing > the characters?
Of course there is! The Chinese characters reflect light in a different pattern, which stimulates the retina differently, which sends different signals to the visual cortex, which sends different signals to the language centres. If knowledge of Chinese has been stored in the language centre the subject understands it, otherwise he does not.
>> That the physical stimulus has >> associated qualia is not observable: >> a scientist would see the neuron >> firing, explain why it fired in physical terms, and then wonder as an >> afterthought if the neuron "felt" anything while it was firing.
> Which is why that approach is doomed to failure. There is no point to > the brain other than to help process qualia. Very little of the brain > is required for a body to survive. Insects have brains, and they > survive quite well.
That the scientist can't see the qualia is not his fault. As a practical matter, knowledge of the mechanics of the brain can help in restoring normal function when things go wrong, even without understanding the qualia.
>> >> A neuron has a limited number of duties: to fire if it sees a certain >> >> potential difference across its cell membrane or a certain >> >> concentration of neurotransmitter.
>> > That is a gross reductionist mispresentation of neurology. You are >> > giving the brain less functionality than mold. Tell me, how does this >> > conversation turn into cell membrane potentials or neurotransmitters?
>> Clearly, it does, since this conversation occurs when the neurons in >> our brains are active.
> My God. You are unbelievable. I give you a straightforward, unarguably > obvious example of a phenomenon which obviously has absolutely nothing > to do with cellular biology but is nonetheless controlling the > behavior of neurological cells, and you answer that that it must be > biological anyways. Your position, literally, is that 'I can't be > wrong, because I already know that I am right.'
Particular brain activity is necessary and sufficient for this conversation to occur. It is necessary because without this brain activity, no conversation. It is sufficient because if this brain activity occurs, the conversation occurs. These are mainstream scientific beliefs which are not disputed, like the fact that the heart pumps blood.
>>The important functionality of the neurons is >> the action potential, since that triggers other neurons and ultimately >> muscle. The complex cellular apparatus in the neuron is there to allow >> this process to happen, as the complex cellular apparatus in the >> thyroid is to enable secretion of thyroxine. An artificial thyroid >> that measured TSH levels and secreted thyroxine accordingly could >> replace the thyroid gland even though it was nothing like the original >> organ in structure.
> But you have no idea what triggers the action potentials in the first > place other than other action potentials. This makes us completely > incapable of any kind of awareness of the outside world. You are > mistaking the steering wheel for the driver.
The outside world gets in via the sense organs, which trigger action potentials in nerves, which then trigger a series of action potentials in the brain.
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> OK, so you agree that the *observable* behaviour of neurons can be
> >> adequately explained in terms of a chain of physical events. The
> >> neurons won't do anything that is apparently magical, right?
> > Are not all of our observations observable behaviors of neurons?
> > You're not understanding how I think observation works. There is no
> > such thing as an observable behavior, it's always a matter of
> > observable how, and by who? If you limit your observation of how
> > neurons behave to what can be detected by a series of metal probes or
> > microscopic antenna, then you are getting a radically limited view of
> > what neurons are and what they do. You are asking a blind man what the
> > Mona Lisa looks like by having him touch the paint, then making a
> > careful impression of his fingers, and then announcing that the Mona
> > Lisa can only do what fingerpainting can do, and that inferring
> > anything beyond the nature of plain old paint to the Mona Lisa is
> > magical. No. It doesn't work that way. A universe where nothing more
> > than paint exists has no capacity to describe an intentional, higher
> > level representation through a medium of paint. The dynamics of paint
> > alone do not describe their important but largely irrelevant role to
> > creating the image.
> Observable behaviours of neurons include things such as ion gates
> opening, neurotransmitter release at the synapse and action potential
> propagation down the axon.
Those phenomena are observable using certain kinds of instruments. Our
native instruments are infinitely more authoritative in observing the
behaviors of neurons.
> I know there may also be non-observables,
> but I'm only asking about the observables.
You are asking about 3-p machine observables.
> Do you agree that if a
> non-observable causes a change in an observable, that would be like
> magic from the point of view of a scientist?
Not at all. We observe 3-p changes caused by 1-p intentionality
routinely. There is a study cited recently in that TV documentary
where the regions of vegetative patients brains associated with
coordinated movements light up an fMRI when being asked to imagine
playing tennis. http://web.me.com/adrian.owen/site/Publications_files/Owen-2006-Futur... p. 693-4
Why do you want me to think that the ordinary relationship between the
brain and the mind is magic? The 'non-observable cause' is the patient
voluntarily imagining playing tennis. There is no other cause. They
were given a choice between tennis and house, and the result of the
fMRI was determined by nothing other than the patient's subjective
choice. So will you stop accusing me of witchcraft about this now or
is there going to be some other way of making me seem like I am the
one rejecting science when it is your position which broadly
reimagines the brain as some kind of closed-circuit Rube Goldberg
apparatus?
> >> > We know that for example, gambling affects the physical behavior of
> >> > the amygdala. What physical force do you posit that emanates from
> >> > 'gambling' that penetrates the skull and blood brain barrier to
> >> > mobilize those neurons?
> >> The skull has various holes in it (the foramen magnum, the orbits,
> >> foramina for the cranial nerves) through which sense data from the
> >> environment enters and, via a series of neural relays, reaches the
> >> amygdala and other parts of the brain.
> > What is 'sense data' made of and how does it get into 'gambling'?
> Sense data could be the sight and sound of a poker machine, which gets
> into the brain, is processed in a complex way, and is understood to be
> "gambling".
By sight and sound do you mean acoustic waves and photons? Those
things don't physically 'get into the brain', do they? You won't find
'sights and sounds' in the bloodstream. If you include them in a model
of neurology, wouldn't you have to include the entire universe?
> > Not at all. The amygdala's response to gambling cannot be observed on
> > an MRI. We can only infer such a cause because we a priori understand
> > the experience of gambling. If we did not, of course we could not
> > infer any kind of association with neural patterns of firing with
> > something like 'winning a big pot in video poker'. That brain activity
> > is not a chain reaction from some other part of the brain. The brain
> > is actually responding to the sense that the mind is making of the
> > outside world and how it relates to the self. It is not going to be
> > predictable from whatever the amygala happens to be doing five seconds
> > or five hours before the win.
> The amygdala's response is visible on a fMRI, which is how we know
> about it. We can infer this without knowing anything about either
> gambling or the brain, noticing that input A (the poker machine) is
> consistently followed by output B (the amygdala lighting up on fMRI).
Input A does not have to be a poker machine. It can be a daydream of a
horse race and give the same fMRI output B. It is only though our
first hand experience of the feelings that these different activities
have in common - risk taking, fear of losing or being caught, etc,
that we have even the foggiest idea of what the amygdala might do.
> >> You have not answered it. You have contradicted yourself by saying we
> >> *don't* observe the brain doing things contrary to physics and we *do*
> >> observe the brain doing things contrary to physics.
> > We don't observe the Mona Lisa doing things contrary to the properties
> > of paint, but we do observe the Mona Lisa as a higher order experience
> > manifested through paint. It's the same thing. Physics doesn't explain
> > the psyche, but psyche uses the physical brain in the ordinary
> > physical ways that the brain can be used.
> But the Mona Lisa does not move of its own accord. That is what it
> would have to do for the situation to be analogous to brain changes
> occurring due to mental processes and not physical processes.
Ok, so use a TV show as an example. That moves. The imaging elements
are being moved remotely by a higher order process. The low level
processes are being instructed by high level processes. Any attempt to
limit our understanding of TV shows to the dynamics of an LCD display
or digital modem will be only mildly informative at best, but will
lead us down a completely misguided path if we decide a priori that TV
shows must be nothing but digital bitstream displays.
> >>You seem to
> >> believe that neurons in the amygdala will fire spontaneously when the
> >> subject thinks about gambling, which would be magic.
> > You don't understand that you are arguing against neuroscience and
> > common sense. Of course you can manually control your electrochemical
> > circuits with thought. That's what all thinking is. It's not that the
> > amygdala fires spontaneously, it's that the thrills and chills of
> > risktaking *are* the firing of the amygdala. You seem to be saying
> > that the brain has our entire life planned out for us in advance as
> > some kind of meaningless encephalographic housekeeping exercise where
> > we have no ability to make ourselves horny by thinking about sex or
> > hungry by thinking about food, no capacity to do or say things based
> > upon the realities outside of our skull rather than the inside.
> I'm not sure if you're not understanding or just pretending not to
> understand. Take any neuron in the brain: it fires due to the
> influences of the surrounding neurons,
Noooo. Millions of neurons fire simultaneously in separate regions of
the brain. Your assumptions about chain reactions being the only way
that neurons fire is not correct. You owe the brain an apology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaQ66lDZ-08
>and each of those neurons fires
> due to the influence of the neurons surrounding it, and so on,
> accounting for all the neurons in the brain.
This is a fairy tale which I have not even heard anyone else claim
before.
>These are the third
> person observable effects; associated with (or identical to, or
> another aspect of, or supervening on, or a side-effect of - it doesn't
> change the argument) this observable activity are the thoughts and
> feelings. A scientist cannot see the thoughts and feelings, since they
> are non-observable.
They are observable directly to the subject. A scientist can research
her behavior of her own brain if she wants to.
> The non-observable thoughts and feelings cannot
> affect the observable physical activity,
If they did not affect the observable physical world then I could not
type to you my thoughts right now. You position is utterly invalid if
genuine, and not even entertaining if trollery.
> for if they could, the
> scientist would see apparently magical events.
>We can still say that
> thought A leads to feeling B, but what the scientist observes is that
> brain state A' (associated with thought A) leads to brain state B'
> (associated with feeling B). So although we can tell the story of the
> person in terms of thoughts and feelings, the scientist can tell the
> same story in terms of biochemical events. If the scientist
> understands the biochemistry then in theory he will be able to predict
> everything the person will do (or write probabilistic equations if
> truly random effects are significant in the brain), although in
> practice due to the
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 6:35 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Do you agree that if a >> non-observable causes a change in an observable, that would be like >> magic from the point of view of a scientist?
> Not at all. We observe 3-p changes caused by 1-p intentionality > routinely. There is a study cited recently in that TV documentary > where the regions of vegetative patients brains associated with > coordinated movements light up an fMRI when being asked to imagine > playing tennis. http://web.me.com/adrian.owen/site/Publications_files/Owen-2006-Futur... > p. 693-4 > Why do you want me to think that the ordinary relationship between the > brain and the mind is magic? The 'non-observable cause' is the patient > voluntarily imagining playing tennis. There is no other cause. They > were given a choice between tennis and house, and the result of the > fMRI was determined by nothing other than the patient's subjective > choice. So will you stop accusing me of witchcraft about this now or > is there going to be some other way of making me seem like I am the > one rejecting science when it is your position which broadly > reimagines the brain as some kind of closed-circuit Rube Goldberg > apparatus?
The patient "voluntarily imagines playing tennis" if and only if certain neural processes occur in the brain. If you believe thoughts can arise in the absence of such neural processes or that thoughts by themselves (i.e. not the associated neural process) can cause physical changes in the brain such as neurons firing then you believe in something like an immaterial soul which does our thinking for us. It's not impossible that there is an immaterial soul but then the question needs to be asked, why would we need a Rube Goldberg apparatus like a brain at all when matter can be directly animated by spirit?
>> Sense data could be the sight and sound of a poker machine, which gets >> into the brain, is processed in a complex way, and is understood to be >> "gambling".
> By sight and sound do you mean acoustic waves and photons? Those > things don't physically 'get into the brain', do they? You won't find > 'sights and sounds' in the bloodstream. If you include them in a model > of neurology, wouldn't you have to include the entire universe?
Light and sound are converted into electrical impulses that travel down the optic and auditory nerves.
>> I'm not sure if you're not understanding or just pretending not to >> understand. Take any neuron in the brain: it fires due to the >> influences of the surrounding neurons,
> Noooo. Millions of neurons fire simultaneously in separate regions of > the brain. Your assumptions about chain reactions being the only way > that neurons fire is not correct. You owe the brain an apology. > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaQ66lDZ-08
>>and each of those neurons fires >> due to the influence of the neurons surrounding it, and so on, >> accounting for all the neurons in the brain.
> This is a fairy tale which I have not even heard anyone else claim > before.
A neuron will fire or not fire due to its internal state and the influence of its environment. It's internal state includes, for example, the resting membrane potential, the intracellular concentration of sodium, potassium and calcium ions, and the type and number of receptor proteins in the membrane. The environment includes which other neurons it interfaces with, the type and concentration of neurotransmitters these neurons may be releasing, the temperature, pH and ionic concentrations in the extracellular fluid, and so on. These factors all go into determining whether the neuron will trigger or not. The analysis applies to every neuron in the brain including the spontaneously active ones. The same thing applies if there is one neuron or a hundred billion neurons, although the large number of neurons will result in much more complex behaviour.
>>These are the third >> person observable effects; associated with (or identical to, or >> another aspect of, or supervening on, or a side-effect of - it doesn't >> change the argument) this observable activity are the thoughts and >> feelings. A scientist cannot see the thoughts and feelings, since they >> are non-observable.
> They are observable directly to the subject. A scientist can research > her behavior of her own brain if she wants to.
>> The non-observable thoughts and feelings cannot >> affect the observable physical activity,
> If they did not affect the observable physical world then I could not > type to you my thoughts right now. You position is utterly invalid if > genuine, and not even entertaining if trollery.
>> for if they could, the >> scientist would see apparently magical events.
> Like voluntary movement of body parts and speech?
You're just not getting it. It's not that movement in the body is not due to thought, but we can't see the thought, we can only see the underlying physical events. So to a scientist, every movement in the body can be attributed to a chain of physical events. If a thought can cause a movement in the absence of a physical event, for example if ligand-dependent ion channels open and trigger an action potential in the absence of the ligand, that would be observed as magical, like a table levitating. You seem to think that not only neurons but every cell has the capacity to do this sort of thing; so why has no scientist ever reported it?
>>We can still say that >> thought A leads to feeling B, but what the scientist observes is that >> brain state A' (associated with thought A) leads to brain state B' >> (associated with feeling B). So although we can tell the story of the >> person in terms of thoughts and feelings, the scientist can tell the >> same story in terms of biochemical events. If the scientist >> understands the biochemistry then in theory he will be able to predict >> everything the person will do (or write probabilistic equations if >> truly random effects are significant in the brain), although in >> practice due to the complexity of the system this would be very >> difficult.
> Some brain states do work that way, but some don't. Anyone that moves > their little finger is going to move it in a neurologically similar > way, but what people want to do for a career is not determinable in > the same way. It depends on where they are born, how they are raised, > what their opportunities are, etc. It's not something which can be > regressed from brain state Q to some kind of precursor brain state G.
Where they were born, how they are raised, what the weather is like all has a physical effect on the brain. If some factor has no impact on the brain then that cannot possibly make a difference to the person. This is not to say that the person's trajectory through life can be predicted, but the weather cannot be predicted with certainty either.
>> "I" am the ensemble of neurons in the brain which when they are >> functioning properly give rise to consciousness and a sense of >> identity. "I" never do anything that can't be explained in terms of a >> chain of neuronal events.
> What makes you think that 'giving rise to consciousness and a sense of > identity' can be explained in terms of a chain of neuronal events. > It's just because you assume a priori that is what consciousness is.
Without trying to "explain" consciousness I know the circumstances under which consciousness can be produced.
>> The making sense of what you read occurs due to certain neuronal >> activity in the language centre of your brain. This may or may not >> cause you to take a certain action, just as a coin may come up heads >> or tails.
> Why is the making sense necessary at all? Why wouldn't the neuronal > activity of reading just cause the neuronal activity of taking a > certain action?
It does - and in so doing, understanding occurs. There are varying degrees of understanding, ranging from blindly following a protocol to analysing what you read in depth. If you analyse what you read in depth the neural processing is more complicated and the resulting decision more difficult to predict. In each case, the understanding supervenes on the neural activity. Disembodied understanding does not come forth from an immaterial soul to move your hand.
>> > A few micrograms of LSD or ricin can change a person's entire life or >> > end it.
>> Yes, there are crucial parts of the system which don't tolerate >> disruption. It's the same with any machine.
> Are you assuming then that consciousness is not such a disruption > intolerant part of the system?
Consciousness is affected by small amounts of specific chemicals but not affected by quite gross physical changes such as the loss of millions of neurons in the course of a day.
>> >> Whether something is conscious or not has nothing to do with whether >> >> it is deterministic or predictable.
>> > What makes you think that's true? Do you have a counterfactual?
>> There is no reason to believe that determinism affects consciousness. >> In general it is impossible to distinguish random from pseudorandom. >> If the brain utilised true random processes and part of it were >> replaced with a component that used a pseudorandom number generator >> with a similar probability function to the true random one we would >> notice no change in behaviour and the subject would notice no change >> in consciousness (for if he did there would be a change in behaviour).
> So the answer is no, you do not have a counterfactual, and that there > is nothing that makes you think that it's true other than it cannot be > proven to be false by non-subjective means. Considering that the whole > question is about subjectivity, to rule out subjective views may not > be a
> On Sep 27, 9:20 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote: > Noooo. Millions of neurons fire simultaneously in separate regions of > the brain. Your assumptions about chain reactions being the only way > that neurons fire is not correct. You owe the brain an apology.
Digital machines can emulate parallelism. In all you answer to Stathis you elude the question by confusing levels of explanation. So either you postulate an infinitely low level (and thus infinities in the brain), or you are introducing the magic mentioned by Stathis.
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 6:35 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Do you agree that if a
> >> non-observable causes a change in an observable, that would be like
> >> magic from the point of view of a scientist?
> > Not at all. We observe 3-p changes caused by 1-p intentionality
> > routinely. There is a study cited recently in that TV documentary
> > where the regions of vegetative patients brains associated with
> > coordinated movements light up an fMRI when being asked to imagine
> > playing tennis.http://web.me.com/adrian.owen/site/Publications_files/Owen-2006-Futur...
> > p. 693-4
> > Why do you want me to think that the ordinary relationship between the
> > brain and the mind is magic? The 'non-observable cause' is the patient
> > voluntarily imagining playing tennis. There is no other cause. They
> > were given a choice between tennis and house, and the result of the
> > fMRI was determined by nothing other than the patient's subjective
> > choice. So will you stop accusing me of witchcraft about this now or
> > is there going to be some other way of making me seem like I am the
> > one rejecting science when it is your position which broadly
> > reimagines the brain as some kind of closed-circuit Rube Goldberg
> > apparatus?
> The patient "voluntarily imagines playing tennis" if and only if
> certain neural processes occur in the brain.
The neural processes and the thoughts are different views of the same
thing. In the case of voluntarily imagining something, it is the
subjective content of the experiences being imagined which makes sense
and the neurological processes are the shadow. There is no strictly
neurological reason for their behavior, let alone one that evokes
'tennis'. If it were something involuntary, like a fever coming on,
then the neurological processes would be the active sensemaking agent
and the experience of getting sick would be the shadow. It's bi-
directional. I know that you won't admit that that could ever be the
case, but I don't understand why.
> can arise in the absence of such neural processes or that thoughts by
> themselves (i.e. not the associated neural process) can cause physical
> changes in the brain such as neurons firing then you believe in
> something like an immaterial soul which does our thinking for us. It's
> not impossible that there is an immaterial soul but then the question
> needs to be asked, why would we need a Rube Goldberg apparatus like a
> brain at all when matter can be directly animated by spirit?
> >> Sense data could be the sight and sound of a poker machine, which gets
> >> into the brain, is processed in a complex way, and is understood to be
> >> "gambling".
> > By sight and sound do you mean acoustic waves and photons? Those
> > things don't physically 'get into the brain', do they? You won't find
> > 'sights and sounds' in the bloodstream. If you include them in a model
> > of neurology, wouldn't you have to include the entire universe?
> Light and sound are converted into electrical impulses that travel
> down the optic and auditory nerves.
> >> I'm not sure if you're not understanding or just pretending not to
> >> understand. Take any neuron in the brain: it fires due to the
> >> influences of the surrounding neurons,
> > Noooo. Millions of neurons fire simultaneously in separate regions of
> > the brain. Your assumptions about chain reactions being the only way
> > that neurons fire is not correct. You owe the brain an apology.
> >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaQ66lDZ-08
> >>and each of those neurons fires
> >> due to the influence of the neurons surrounding it, and so on,
> >> accounting for all the neurons in the brain.
> > This is a fairy tale which I have not even heard anyone else claim
> > before.
> A neuron will fire or not fire due to its internal state and the
> influence of its environment. It's internal state includes, for
> example, the resting membrane potential, the intracellular
> concentration of sodium, potassium and calcium ions, and the type and
> number of receptor proteins in the membrane. The environment includes
> which other neurons it interfaces with, the type and concentration of
> neurotransmitters these neurons may be releasing, the temperature, pH
> and ionic concentrations in the extracellular fluid, and so on. These
> factors all go into determining whether the neuron will trigger or
> not. The analysis applies to every neuron in the brain including the
> spontaneously active ones. The same thing applies if there is one
> neuron or a hundred billion neurons, although the large number of
> neurons will result in much more complex behaviour.
> >>These are the third
> >> person observable effects; associated with (or identical to, or
> >> another aspect of, or supervening on, or a side-effect of - it doesn't
> >> change the argument) this observable activity are the thoughts and
> >> feelings. A scientist cannot see the thoughts and feelings, since they
> >> are non-observable.
> > They are observable directly to the subject. A scientist can research
> > her behavior of her own brain if she wants to.
> >> The non-observable thoughts and feelings cannot
> >> affect the observable physical activity,
> > If they did not affect the observable physical world then I could not
> > type to you my thoughts right now. You position is utterly invalid if
> > genuine, and not even entertaining if trollery.
> >> for if they could, the
> >> scientist would see apparently magical events.
> > Like voluntary movement of body parts and speech?
> You're just not getting it. It's not that movement in the body is not
> due to thought, but we can't see the thought, we can only see the
> underlying physical events.
We can't see the thought through a microscope, no. We can only see it
from inside of the brain, but from here, of course we can see the
thought.
> So to a scientist, every movement in the
> body can be attributed to a chain of physical events.
What kind of a scientist? Do you not consider psychology, sociology,
or anthropology sciences?
> If a thought can
> cause a movement in the absence of a physical event, for example if
> ligand-dependent ion channels open and trigger an action potential in
> the absence of the ligand, that would be observed as magical, like a
> table levitating.
The thought *is* a physical event, it's just the subjective view of
it. It's many physical events, each with a subjective view, but
together, rather than forming a machine of objects related in space,
the experiential side is experiences over time which are shared as a
single, deeper, richer experience stream over time.
As for 'getting it', every time that you mention magic, I know that
you haven't yet understood what I'm talking about. I already
understand your view thoroughly, though, because I used to share the
same view.
>You seem to think that not only neurons but every
> cell has the capacity to do this sort of thing; so why has no
> scientist ever reported it?
You're not getting it. It's not a thing that cells have a capacity to
do, it's a thing that cells are. In addition to being a little pocket
of cytoplasm, they are a little perceiving agent, just as a molecule
or atom. What they do is not a function just of what we can see from
the exterior, but of what the experience is on the interior.
> >>We can still say that
> >> thought A leads to feeling B, but what the scientist observes is that
> >> brain state A' (associated with thought A) leads to brain state B'
> >> (associated with feeling B). So although we can tell the story of the
> >> person in terms of thoughts and feelings, the scientist can tell the
> >> same story in terms of biochemical events. If the scientist
> >> understands the biochemistry then in theory he will be able to predict
> >> everything the person will do (or write probabilistic equations if
> >> truly random effects are significant in the brain), although in
> >> practice due to the complexity of the system this would be very
> >> difficult.
> > Some brain states do work that way, but some don't. Anyone that moves
> > their little finger is going to move it in a neurologically similar
> > way, but what people want to do for a career is not determinable in
> > the same way. It depends on where they are born, how they are raised,
> > what their opportunities are, etc. It's not something which can be
> > regressed from brain state Q to some kind of precursor brain state G.
> Where they were born, how they are raised, what the weather is like
> all has a physical effect on the brain. If some factor has no impact
> on the brain then that cannot possibly make a difference to the
> person. This is not to say that the person's trajectory through life
> can be predicted, but the weather cannot be predicted with certainty
> either.
The physical effect on the brain goes hand in hand with the effects of
their nurture, but it's irrelevant. It's the residue of the
experience, not the cause of it.
> >> "I" am the ensemble of neurons in the brain which when they are
> >> functioning properly give rise to consciousness and a sense of
> >> identity. "I" never do anything that can't be explained in terms of a
> >> chain of neuronal events.
> > What makes you think that 'giving rise to consciousness and a sense of
> > identity' can be explained in terms of a chain of neuronal events.
> > It's just because you assume a priori that is what consciousness is.
> Without trying to "explain" consciousness I know the circumstances
> under which
On Sep 28, 10:26 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 27 Sep 2011, at 22:35, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> > On Sep 27, 9:20 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Noooo. Millions of neurons fire simultaneously in separate regions of
> > the brain. Your assumptions about chain reactions being the only way
> > that neurons fire is not correct. You owe the brain an apology.
> Digital machines can emulate parallelism.
> In all you answer to Stathis you elude the question by confusing
> levels of explanation.
> So either you postulate an infinitely low level (and thus infinities
> in the brain), or you are introducing the magic mentioned by Stathis.
Yes, this is just a tangent, I'm trying to show that the model of the
brain as a chain reaction is factually incorrect. I agree, parallelism
says nothing about whether it's computational or not, it's just that
Stathis is trying to actually claim that psychological processes
cannot drive lower level neurology.
> On Sep 28, 10:26 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: >> On 27 Sep 2011, at 22:35, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>>> On Sep 27, 9:20 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Noooo. Millions of neurons fire simultaneously in separate regions >>> of >>> the brain. Your assumptions about chain reactions being the only way >>> that neurons fire is not correct. You owe the brain an apology.
>> Digital machines can emulate parallelism. >> In all you answer to Stathis you elude the question by confusing >> levels of explanation. >> So either you postulate an infinitely low level (and thus infinities >> in the brain), or you are introducing the magic mentioned by Stathis.
> Yes, this is just a tangent, I'm trying to show that the model of the > brain as a chain reaction is factually incorrect. I agree, parallelism > says nothing about whether it's computational or not, it's just that > Stathis is trying to actually claim that psychological processes > cannot drive lower level neurology.
In a sense I can follow you. If I feel in pain I can take a drug, and in this case a high level psychological process can change a lower level neuro process. But I am sure Stathis agree with this. That whole cycle can still be driven by still lower computable laws. A universal machine can emulate another self-transforming universal machine. That's the point.
> > On Sep 28, 10:26 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> >> On 27 Sep 2011, at 22:35, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> >>> On Sep 27, 9:20 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Noooo. Millions of neurons fire simultaneously in separate regions
> >>> of
> >>> the brain. Your assumptions about chain reactions being the only way
> >>> that neurons fire is not correct. You owe the brain an apology.
> >> Digital machines can emulate parallelism.
> >> In all you answer to Stathis you elude the question by confusing
> >> levels of explanation.
> >> So either you postulate an infinitely low level (and thus infinities
> >> in the brain), or you are introducing the magic mentioned by Stathis.
> > Yes, this is just a tangent, I'm trying to show that the model of the
> > brain as a chain reaction is factually incorrect. I agree, parallelism
> > says nothing about whether it's computational or not, it's just that
> > Stathis is trying to actually claim that psychological processes
> > cannot drive lower level neurology.
> In a sense I can follow you. If I feel in pain I can take a drug, and
> in this case a high level psychological process can change a lower
> level neuro process. But I am sure Stathis agree with this. That whole
> cycle can still be driven by still lower computable laws. A universal
> machine can emulate another self-transforming universal machine.
> That's the point.
I would still say that at some point 'I' participates directly and non-
deterministically in the process. Even if only to arbitrate between
many conflicting subordinate senses and motives, all of which I
suspect have more deterministic but still 'not-as-deterministic-as'
processes such as those within inorganic molecules or atoms. The I
herself may not be completely non-computational and indeterministic,
but that doesn't mean that she has no control of her thoughts,
opinions, and actions either.
What my hypothesis offers though, is to make concrete the abstraction
of 'lower computable laws' so that they are not metaphysical, but
intraphysical. They are actual sensorimotive experiences localized in
and through matter. Like the laws we follow as citizens, we are
compelled to do so by the senses of social identification and motives
of avoiding negative consequences. It's a subjective experience which
can be abstracted into a formula with reasonable success, but the
experience is not the same thing as the formula, the map is not the
territory, etc.
If we recognize that the example of how we as individuals follow
'laws', not because those laws are metaphysical programs which are
deterministically executed on unwitting helpless voyeurs, but because
the customs, practices, and expectations of our niche are
recapitulated locally in the individual as sensorimotive dynamics. The
actual literal process by which laws and customs are upheld is not
though explicit codes, it's because we don't like the feeling of going
against our conditioning. It makes us nervous and ashamed; fearful,
etc.
I'm not saying that atoms bond together because they are lonely or the
Krebs cycle propagates because citric acid was raised to believe that
it has a job to do, but that in each case there is likely a
corresponding nano-sensorimotive experience going on. When you realize
that the senses and motives which have grown great enough to catch the
attention of the 'I', that they are trillions of times more saturated
and nuanced than those sensorimotives arising from the individual
cells and molecules, we can see that the proto-experience of an
individual neuron-eukaryote need not be anthropomorphized to a large
extent.
It can be calculated as a history of action potentials, but that
doesn't explain what the action potentials actually are. They are semi-
voluntary (some more voluntary than others) participatory spasms. We
are used to imagining these impulses like electric sparks or flashes
of light inside the brain, but they only look like sparks when viewed
through a device which records them that way. To the naked eye you
won't see any sparks, and to the subject whose brain it is, there are
only thoughts, images, and feelings.
> On Sep 29, 3:21 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: >> On 28 Sep 2011, at 17:48, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>>> On Sep 28, 10:26 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: >>>> On 27 Sep 2011, at 22:35, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>>>>> On Sep 27, 9:20 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> >>>>> wrote: >>>>> Noooo. Millions of neurons fire simultaneously in separate regions >>>>> of >>>>> the brain. Your assumptions about chain reactions being the only >>>>> way >>>>> that neurons fire is not correct. You owe the brain an apology.
>>>> Digital machines can emulate parallelism. >>>> In all you answer to Stathis you elude the question by confusing >>>> levels of explanation. >>>> So either you postulate an infinitely low level (and thus >>>> infinities >>>> in the brain), or you are introducing the magic mentioned by >>>> Stathis.
>>> Yes, this is just a tangent, I'm trying to show that the model of >>> the >>> brain as a chain reaction is factually incorrect. I agree, >>> parallelism >>> says nothing about whether it's computational or not, it's just that >>> Stathis is trying to actually claim that psychological processes >>> cannot drive lower level neurology.
>> In a sense I can follow you. If I feel in pain I can take a drug, and >> in this case a high level psychological process can change a lower >> level neuro process. But I am sure Stathis agree with this. That >> whole >> cycle can still be driven by still lower computable laws. A universal >> machine can emulate another self-transforming universal machine. >> That's the point.
> I would still say that at some point 'I' participates directly and > non- > deterministically in the process. Even if only to arbitrate between > many conflicting subordinate senses and motives, all of which I > suspect have more deterministic but still 'not-as-deterministic-as' > processes such as those within inorganic molecules or atoms. The I > herself may not be completely non-computational and indeterministic, > but that doesn't mean that she has no control of her thoughts, > opinions, and actions either.
> What my hypothesis offers though, is to make concrete the abstraction > of 'lower computable laws' so that they are not metaphysical, but > intraphysical. They are actual sensorimotive experiences localized in > and through matter. Like the laws we follow as citizens, we are > compelled to do so by the senses of social identification and motives > of avoiding negative consequences. It's a subjective experience which > can be abstracted into a formula with reasonable success, but the > experience is not the same thing as the formula, the map is not the > territory, etc.
> If we recognize that the example of how we as individuals follow > 'laws', not because those laws are metaphysical programs which are > deterministically executed on unwitting helpless voyeurs, but because > the customs, practices, and expectations of our niche are > recapitulated locally in the individual as sensorimotive dynamics. The > actual literal process by which laws and customs are upheld is not > though explicit codes, it's because we don't like the feeling of going > against our conditioning. It makes us nervous and ashamed; fearful, > etc.
> I'm not saying that atoms bond together because they are lonely or the > Krebs cycle propagates because citric acid was raised to believe that > it has a job to do, but that in each case there is likely a > corresponding nano-sensorimotive experience going on. When you realize > that the senses and motives which have grown great enough to catch the > attention of the 'I', that they are trillions of times more saturated > and nuanced than those sensorimotives arising from the individual > cells and molecules, we can see that the proto-experience of an > individual neuron-eukaryote need not be anthropomorphized to a large > extent.
> It can be calculated as a history of action potentials, but that > doesn't explain what the action potentials actually are. They are > semi- > voluntary (some more voluntary than others) participatory spasms. We > are used to imagining these impulses like electric sparks or flashes > of light inside the brain, but they only look like sparks when viewed > through a device which records them that way. To the naked eye you > won't see any sparks, and to the subject whose brain it is, there are > only thoughts, images, and feelings.
I don't feel this very compelling. You have to assume some primitive matter, and notion of localization. This is the kind of strong metaphysical and aristotleian assumption which I am not sure to see the need for, beyond extrapolating from our direct experience. You have to assume mind, and a form of panpsychism, which seems to me as much problematic than what it is supposed to explain or at least describe. The link between both remains as unexplainable as before.
You attribute to me a metaphysical assumption, where I assume only what is taught in high school to everyone, + the idea that at some level matter (not primitive matter, but the matter we can observe when we look at our bodies) obeys deterministic laws, where you make three metaphysical assumptions: matter, mind and a link which refer to notion that you don't succeed to define (like sensorimotive).
Then you derive from this that the third person "I" is not Turing emulable, but this appears to be non justified too, even if we are willing to accept some meaning in those nanosensorimotive actions (which I am not, for I don't have a clue about what they can be).
On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 1:45 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: > The neural processes and the thoughts are different views of the same > thing. In the case of voluntarily imagining something, it is the > subjective content of the experiences being imagined which makes sense > and the neurological processes are the shadow. There is no strictly > neurological reason for their behavior, let alone one that evokes > 'tennis'. If it were something involuntary, like a fever coming on, > then the neurological processes would be the active sensemaking agent > and the experience of getting sick would be the shadow. It's bi- > directional. I know that you won't admit that that could ever be the > case, but I don't understand why.
There *is* a strictly neurological reason for the 3-P observable behaviour. If we limit ourselves to talking about that, do you agree?
>> If a thought can >> cause a movement in the absence of a physical event, for example if >> ligand-dependent ion channels open and trigger an action potential in >> the absence of the ligand, that would be observed as magical, like a >> table levitating.
> The thought *is* a physical event, it's just the subjective view of > it. It's many physical events, each with a subjective view, but > together, rather than forming a machine of objects related in space, > the experiential side is experiences over time which are shared as a > single, deeper, richer experience stream over time.
But you can't see the thought. Restrict discussion for now to the 3-P observable behaviour of a neuron being investigated by a cell biologist. From the scientist's point of view, the neuron only fires in response to stimuli such as neurotransmitters at the synapse (depending on what sort of neuron it is). Do you see that if the thought makes the neuron do anything other than what the scientist expects it to do from consideration of its physical properties and the physical properties of the environment then it would be observed to be behaving magically?
> You are not answering my question. Why does there need to be > 'understanding' at all? You are saying that neurology causes something > to occur: understanding. What do you mean by that. What is it? Magic? > Metaphysics?
It's something which cannot be reduced to something simpler.
>> Again I don't think you understand what would happen if you replaced >> part of your brain with a qualia-less component that had the same >> third person observable behaviour. Perhaps you could tell me in your >> own words if you do.
> What would really happen is that it could not have the same third > person observable behavior. If someone is deaf, you cannot observe > their lack of hearing by observing them, unless you intentionally try > to test them. If you replace someones eyes with eyes which only see in > the x-ray spectrum, then the visual cortex would pick it up in the > familiar colors of the visible spectrum. If you replaced the visual > cortex with something that processes optical stimulation in the eyes > invisibly, then the patient would see nothing but would develop > perceptual compensation from their other senses very rapidly compared > with someone who went blind suddenly. They would have to learn to read > their new optical capacity and it would not be visual, but it would > enable them eventually to behave as a sighted person in most relevant > ways.
The replacement part reproduces the 3-P behaviour of the biological part. This means the rest of the brain also has the same 3-P behaviour, since it is subjected to the same 3-P environmental influences from the replacement part (that is what was reproduced, even if the qualia were not). So the subject behaves as if he has normal vision and hearing and believes that he has normal vision and hearing.
You may object that the rest of the subject's brain does not behave normally since it lacks the input from the qualia. But if the qualia affect neurons directly, over and above what you would expect from the qualia-less physical activity, that would mean that magical events are observed.
On Sep 29, 10:29 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> I don't feel this very compelling.
> You have to assume some primitive matter, and notion of localization.
Why? I think you only have to assume the appearance of matter and
localization, which we do already.
> This is the kind of strong metaphysical and aristotleian assumption
> which I am not sure to see the need for, beyond extrapolating from our
> direct experience.
Is it better to extrapolate only from indirect experience?
> You have to assume mind, and a form of panpsychism, which seems to me
> as much problematic than what it is supposed to explain or at least
> describe.
It wouldn't be panpsychism exactly, any more than neurochemistry is
panbrainism. The idea is that whatever sensorimotive experience taking
place at these microcosmic levels is nothing like what we, as a
conscious collaboration of trillions of these things, can relate to.
It's more like protopsychism.
> The link between both remains as unexplainable as before.
Mind would be a sensorimotive structure. The link between the
sensorimotive and electromagnetic is the invariance between the two.
> You attribute to me a metaphysical assumption, where I assume only
> what is taught in high school to everyone, + the idea that at some
> level matter (not primitive matter, but the matter we can observe when
> we look at our bodies) obeys deterministic laws, where you make three
> metaphysical assumptions: matter, mind and a link which refer to
> notion that you don't succeed to define (like sensorimotive).
> Then you derive from this that the third person "I" is not Turing
> emulable, but this appears to be non justified too, even if we are
> willing to accept some meaning in those nanosensorimotive actions
> (which I am not, for I don't have a clue about what they can be).
The "I" is always first person. The brain or body would be third
person. What do you think of Super-Turing computation?
On Sep 29, 10:31 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There *is* a strictly neurological reason for the 3-P observable
> behaviour. If we limit ourselves to talking about that, do you agree?
I would say no, because I would not describe something like 'gambling'
as strictly neurological reason in the sense that I think you intend
it. Of course all of our feelings and perceptions are neurological
experiences in the broad sense, but that's just because neurological
structures feel and perceive.
> >> If a thought can
> >> cause a movement in the absence of a physical event, for example if
> >> ligand-dependent ion channels open and trigger an action potential in
> >> the absence of the ligand, that would be observed as magical, like a
> >> table levitating.
> > The thought *is* a physical event, it's just the subjective view of
> > it. It's many physical events, each with a subjective view, but
> > together, rather than forming a machine of objects related in space,
> > the experiential side is experiences over time which are shared as a
> > single, deeper, richer experience stream over time.
> But you can't see the thought. Restrict discussion for now to the 3-P
> observable behaviour of a neuron being investigated by a cell
> biologist. From the scientist's point of view, the neuron only fires
> in response to stimuli such as neurotransmitters at the synapse
> (depending on what sort of neuron it is).
No, you can see in that brain animation that the neuron fires whenever
it needs to /wants to. It's actions aren't inevitable or scheduled in
some way, it's responding directly to the overall perceptions and
motives of the person as a whole as well as all of the congruences and
conflicts amongst the subordinate neural pathways.
>Do you see that if the
> thought makes the neuron do anything other than what the scientist
> expects it to do from consideration of its physical properties and the
> physical properties of the environment then it would be observed to be
> behaving magically?
Only if the scientist knew nothing about neurology. What the neurons
do, collectively *is* thought. It's no different than how bacteria use
quorum sensing to make collective decisions. I understand why you
might assume that neurons are passive receptacles to some kind of
neurological law, but that is not the case. They are living organisms.
They communicate with each other. They do things as a group. Neurons
are much more complicated and unpredictable. They are able to do what
they want to do, not just what they have to do.
> > You are not answering my question. Why does there need to be
> > 'understanding' at all? You are saying that neurology causes something
> > to occur: understanding. What do you mean by that. What is it? Magic?
> > Metaphysics?
> It's something which cannot be reduced to something simpler.
Irreducibility is just a characteristic of it. Saying that doesn't
explain what it is.
> >> Again I don't think you understand what would happen if you replaced
> >> part of your brain with a qualia-less component that had the same
> >> third person observable behaviour. Perhaps you could tell me in your
> >> own words if you do.
> > What would really happen is that it could not have the same third
> > person observable behavior. If someone is deaf, you cannot observe
> > their lack of hearing by observing them, unless you intentionally try
> > to test them. If you replace someones eyes with eyes which only see in
> > the x-ray spectrum, then the visual cortex would pick it up in the
> > familiar colors of the visible spectrum. If you replaced the visual
> > cortex with something that processes optical stimulation in the eyes
> > invisibly, then the patient would see nothing but would develop
> > perceptual compensation from their other senses very rapidly compared
> > with someone who went blind suddenly. They would have to learn to read
> > their new optical capacity and it would not be visual, but it would
> > enable them eventually to behave as a sighted person in most relevant
> > ways.
> The replacement part reproduces the 3-P behaviour of the biological
> part.
I think that's a mistake to begin with. Does a plastic plant reproduce
the 3-P behavior of a biological plant? If you don't know what the
behavior is, how do you know that it's possible to reproduce it by
other means? You're just assuming that it is like a metal washer that
can be replaced with a plastic one, but we have no reason to think
that this is anything like that.
>This means the rest of the brain also has the same 3-P
> behaviour, since it is subjected to the same 3-P environmental
> influences from the replacement part (that is what was reproduced,
> even if the qualia were not). So the subject behaves as if he has
> normal vision and hearing and believes that he has normal vision and
> hearing.
It's jumping to a conclusion based on an incorrect assumption. I've
already outlined exactly what I think would happen in the different
replacement scenarios. None of them involve the subject immediately
behaving as if they could see without seeing. It's a blatantly
simplistic and overly theoretical proposition to see this replacement
idea as illuminating. It's a bad example. It's not even good science
fiction.
> You may object that the rest of the subject's brain does not behave
> normally since it lacks the input from the qualia. But if the qualia
> affect neurons directly, over and above what you would expect from the
> qualia-less physical activity, that would mean that magical events are
> observed.
The qualia affect the experience of the neuron's interior. Whether
that translates into some motive output behavior depends on the
neuron's interpretation. You are not seeing that there is constant
interaction between the sensorimotive interior and electromagnetic
exterior - sometimes it's the sensorimotive inducing the
electromagnetic, and sometimes it's the other way around. You can't
always tell which is which from the outside or the inside.
> On Sep 29, 10:31 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> There *is* a strictly neurological reason for the 3-P observable >> behaviour. If we limit ourselves to talking about that, do you agree?
> I would say no, because I would not describe something like 'gambling' > as strictly neurological reason in the sense that I think you intend > it. Of course all of our feelings and perceptions are neurological > experiences in the broad sense, but that's just because neurological > structures feel and perceive.
>>>> If a thought can >>>> cause a movement in the absence of a physical event, for example if >>>> ligand-dependent ion channels open and trigger an action >>>> potential in >>>> the absence of the ligand, that would be observed as magical, >>>> like a >>>> table levitating.
>>> The thought *is* a physical event, it's just the subjective view of >>> it. It's many physical events, each with a subjective view, but >>> together, rather than forming a machine of objects related in space, >>> the experiential side is experiences over time which are shared as a >>> single, deeper, richer experience stream over time.
>> But you can't see the thought. Restrict discussion for now to the 3-P >> observable behaviour of a neuron being investigated by a cell >> biologist. From the scientist's point of view, the neuron only fires >> in response to stimuli such as neurotransmitters at the synapse >> (depending on what sort of neuron it is).
> No, you can see in that brain animation that the neuron fires whenever > it needs to /wants to. It's actions aren't inevitable or scheduled in > some way, it's responding directly to the overall perceptions and > motives of the person as a whole as well as all of the congruences and > conflicts amongst the subordinate neural pathways.
>> Do you see that if the >> thought makes the neuron do anything other than what the scientist >> expects it to do from consideration of its physical properties and >> the >> physical properties of the environment then it would be observed to >> be >> behaving magically?
> Only if the scientist knew nothing about neurology. What the neurons > do, collectively *is* thought. It's no different than how bacteria use > quorum sensing to make collective decisions. I understand why you > might assume that neurons are passive receptacles to some kind of > neurological law, but that is not the case. They are living organisms.
> They communicate with each other. They do things as a group. Neurons > are much more complicated and unpredictable. They are able to do what > they want to do, not just what they have to do.
>>> You are not answering my question. Why does there need to be >>> 'understanding' at all? You are saying that neurology causes >>> something >>> to occur: understanding. What do you mean by that. What is it? >>> Magic? >>> Metaphysics?
>> It's something which cannot be reduced to something simpler.
> Irreducibility is just a characteristic of it. Saying that doesn't > explain what it is.
>>>> Again I don't think you understand what would happen if you >>>> replaced >>>> part of your brain with a qualia-less component that had the same >>>> third person observable behaviour. Perhaps you could tell me in >>>> your >>>> own words if you do.
>>> What would really happen is that it could not have the same third >>> person observable behavior. If someone is deaf, you cannot observe >>> their lack of hearing by observing them, unless you intentionally >>> try >>> to test them. If you replace someones eyes with eyes which only >>> see in >>> the x-ray spectrum, then the visual cortex would pick it up in the >>> familiar colors of the visible spectrum. If you replaced the visual >>> cortex with something that processes optical stimulation in the eyes >>> invisibly, then the patient would see nothing but would develop >>> perceptual compensation from their other senses very rapidly >>> compared >>> with someone who went blind suddenly. They would have to learn to >>> read >>> their new optical capacity and it would not be visual, but it would >>> enable them eventually to behave as a sighted person in most >>> relevant >>> ways.
>> The replacement part reproduces the 3-P behaviour of the biological >> part.
> I think that's a mistake to begin with. Does a plastic plant reproduce > the 3-P behavior of a biological plant? If you don't know what the > behavior is, how do you know that it's possible to reproduce it by > other means? You're just assuming that it is like a metal washer that > can be replaced with a plastic one, but we have no reason to think > that this is anything like that.
>> This means the rest of the brain also has the same 3-P >> behaviour, since it is subjected to the same 3-P environmental >> influences from the replacement part (that is what was reproduced, >> even if the qualia were not). So the subject behaves as if he has >> normal vision and hearing and believes that he has normal vision and >> hearing.
> It's jumping to a conclusion based on an incorrect assumption. I've > already outlined exactly what I think would happen in the different > replacement scenarios. None of them involve the subject immediately > behaving as if they could see without seeing. It's a blatantly > simplistic and overly theoretical proposition to see this replacement > idea as illuminating. It's a bad example. It's not even good science > fiction.
>> You may object that the rest of the subject's brain does not behave >> normally since it lacks the input from the qualia. But if the qualia >> affect neurons directly, over and above what you would expect from >> the >> qualia-less physical activity, that would mean that magical events >> are >> observed.
> The qualia affect the experience of the neuron's interior. Whether > that translates into some motive output behavior depends on the > neuron's interpretation. You are not seeing that there is constant > interaction between the sensorimotive interior and electromagnetic > exterior - sometimes it's the sensorimotive inducing the > electromagnetic, and sometimes it's the other way around. You can't > always tell which is which from the outside or the inside.
> Craig
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