Is your elbow conscious?

[Philip Thrift]

On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 8:00:42 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/16/2019 5:52 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

This is what I call one form of consciousness denial

      https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/

in that information processing absent actual first-class entities of qualia (or experiences) can only produce zombies. One needs information processing operating in a material substrate where those entities are available to be combined and manipulated.

You still need to explain why your elbow isn't conscious.

Brent

 

The elbow (the matter that is halfway down your arm between your shoulder and hand) could have proto-consciousness (or a proto-experientiality, as some say): 

      https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#PanpVersPanp

But the elbow will not have full consciousness (first-person) because it cannot do information processing (at the level of the brain with all its neural connectivity).

High-level (and higher-order) information processing is necessary, but not sufficient for consciousness.

That is all of panpsychism in a nutshell.

(I've posted the research of Hedda Hassel Mørch here several times now. This is what she talks about.)

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

On 5/16/2019 6:29 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

You still need to explain why your elbow isn't conscious.

Brent

 

The elbow (the matter that is halfway down your arm between your shoulder and hand) could have proto-consciousness (or a proto-experientiality, as some say): 

      https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#PanpVersPanp

But the elbow will not have full consciousness (first-person) because it cannot do information processing (at the level of the brain with all its neural connectivity).

High-level (and higher-order) information processing is necessary, but not sufficient for consciousness.

That is all of panpsychism in a nutshell.

But then "panpyschism" does no work.  It's just a hypothetical property of matter that says if some matter does information processing then that matter is conscious, otherwise it's not.  But that's already what materialists thought.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

This was prefaced by:

Information processing absent actual first-class entities of qualia (or experiences) can only produce zombies. One needs information processing operating in a material substrate where those entities are available to be combined and manipulated.

There is information processing in an elbow, but that information processing is not at the level of information processing in the brain.

But information processing in the brain, while at the level it needs to be for consciousness, needs to be operating in that substrate where the experiential entities are available to be combined and manipulated.

@philipthift 

[John Clark]

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 1:48 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Information processing absent actual first-class entities of qualia (or experiences) can only produce zombies. One needs information processing operating in a material substrate where those entities are available to be combined and manipulated.

So something can behave intelligently but if it is lacking "first-class entities of qualia" it can only be a intelligent zombie. But "first-class qualia" sounds like  consciousness to me, so you're basically saying only conscious things can be conscious. A tautology has the virtue of always being true but it involves a unnecessary non-required pointless repetition and reiteration of words where you end up at the exact same place you started with. And that is typical of all consciousness theories.

John K Clark

[Telmo Menezes]

Well said.

Telmo.

Brent

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[Philip Thrift]

To be clearer: Qualia (the "ingredients" of consciousness) cannot be reduced to information processing. (That is what I mean by "first-class". If qualia could  be reduced to information processing, then they would derivative from information, or "second-class".)

But what is information processing? I just mean it in its generally and conventional definition as a subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_processing

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information

Now can qualia be reduced to information? That is the question of central concern:

Information and the Origin of Qualia

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5399078/

This article argues that qualia are a likely outcome of the processing of information in local cortical networks. It uses an information-based approach and makes a distinction between information structures (the physical embodiment of information in the brain, primarily patterns of action potentials), and information messages (the meaning of those structures to the brain, and the basis of qualia). It develops formal relationships between these two kinds of information, showing how information structures can represent messages, and how information messages can be identified from structures. The article applies this perspective to basic processing in cortical networks or ensembles, showing how networks can transform between the two kinds of information. The article argues that an input pattern of firing is identified by a network as an information message, and that the output pattern of firing generated is a representation of that message. If a network is encouraged to develop an attractor state through attention or other re-entrant processes, then the message identified each time physical information is cycled through the network becomes “representation of the previous message”. Using an example of olfactory perception, it is shown how this piggy-backing of messages on top of previous messages could lead to olfactory qualia. The message identified on each pass of information could evolve from inner identity, to inner form, to inner likeness or image. The outcome is an olfactory quale. It is shown that the same outcome could result from information cycled through a hierarchy of networks in a resonant state. The argument for qualia generation is applied to other sensory modalities, showing how, through a process of brain-wide constraint satisfaction, a particular state of consciousness could develop at any given moment. Evidence for some of the key predictions of the theory is presented, using ECoG data and studies of gamma oscillations and attractors, together with an outline of what further evidence is needed to provide support for the theory.

Now I would just way that the jury is out about qualia ⇨ information. If the above paper is right, then it's sort of settled, right? I still think the phenomenologists are right, that quaia is a different type of entity than information, or that that matter (in particular matter with consciousness/qualia) has both informationality and experientiality, that there is a calculus of experience that the brain is processing.

But it isn't settled.

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 1:42:41 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

But then "panpyschism" does no work.  It's just a hypothetical property of matter that says if some matter does information processing then that matter is conscious, otherwise it's not.  But that's already what materialists thought.

Well said.

Telmo.

But a robot - which is matter - that is doing very advanced, high-level information processing - could be a winner on Jeopardy, and talk to you in a conversation, could be a zombie.

Are you a zombie?

@philipthrift 

[Philip Thrift]

On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 5:17:59 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

 if you think exhibiting reflexes is the critereon for consciousness, consider the example of someone who has held their breath for fifteen minutes.

Brent

A reflex (say in an elbow) might be considered an example of the presence of proto-experientiality.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 2:51 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> But what is information processing?

It is the process of extracting information from data, and information is the resolution of uncertainty. And my unproven assumption (which will never be proven but is the only thing that prevents me from becoming a solipsist) is that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed.

> a robot - which is matter - that is doing very advanced, high-level information processing - could be a winner on Jeopardy, and talk to you in a conversation, could be a zombie.

If you somehow knew for a fact a brilliant being was a zombie then you could immediately make one conclusion about it, the being could NOT be the product of Darwinian Evolution because Natural Selection can see intelligence but it can't see consciousness in others any better than we can, and it can't select for something it can't see. But of course there is no way you could ever know a brilliant being was a zombie or know he was not a zombie either unless a important assumption is made, intelligent behavior implies consciousness.  

> Are you a zombie?

No. But isn't that what you'd expect a philosophical zombie to say?

> Now I would just way that the jury is out about qualia ⇨ information.

The jury is NOT out over the fact that if your consciousness changes the informational processing of your brain changes and if the informational processing of your brain changes your consciousness changes. Regarding all other matters involving consciousness the jury is still out and will remain out until the end of time, and that's why complex consciousness theories are such a complete waste of time.  

 

> If the above paper is right, then it's sort of settled, right?

The question of consciousness is as settled as it's ever going to be, that's why the field of consciousness research has not moved an inch or even a nanometer in a century. But Artificial INTELLIGENCE research is alive and well.
 

> I still think the phenomenologists are right, that quaia is a different type of entity than information,

Obviously they're different things but they're intimately related.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

I'm not going to 

    The Science of Consciousness 2019

     https://www.tsc2019-interlaken.ch/

next month (so Interlaken will be without me), but there is a whole bunch of people who think the subject of consciousness is a serious scientific endeavor.

As you know I worked in an AI lab in the '80s and '90s

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments#Artificial_intelligence

and I have several AI patents from that time. (One of the people I worked with there I saw just last week is now working for an AI company making software for cars (e.g. self-driving) with computer vision.

AI via information processing (conventional computing) will of course get very good. But my sense is that experience processing becomes a matter of interest when the "compiled object code" is produced via biocompilers (or compilers to bio-like materials).

@philipthrift

 

[Brent Meeker]

Not if human-level intelligent behavior is a mark of consciousness.   How do you tell if someone is conscious?

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

There is the paper I posted here earlier. Here's the conclusion. Do you have something better?

Information and the Origin of Qualia

Roger Orpwood

Centre for Pain Research, Department for Health, University of Bath

...

Despite the overwhelming likelihood that all higher animals experience a degree of consciousness, the only animals we can be a 100% certain about are humans. Therefore it is necessary ultimately to measure activity in humans that underpins conscious experience. For the theory presented here that evidence has to come from monitoring the activity of networks of individual cells, with sub-millisecond resolution, to see how they behave during conscious acts and how that differs to unconscious acts. Such work would necessarily have to remove co-varying activity relating to such things as allocation of attention, activity relating to the reporting process, anticipation, etc. Techniques for population monitoring are of course developing fast, with the pioneering use of 2-photon calcium imaging. At present this technique is not quite fast enough to explore the detail firing activity of cells in networks but this is surely not far off. In the first instance such techniques can be usefully used with higher mammals who are strongly suspected of having conscious experience. Strong pointers would result from monitoring local activity such as that described in this article as the animal indicated a perception as opposed to not indicating a perception. If in parallel with such measurements a signature of that activity could be defined using EEG, MEG or ECoG that would enable human experiments to look for those signatures. Ultimately though it will be necessary to find a technique that can be used in humans, perhaps an ethically acceptable form of light imaging, that can detect the local activity described and to show that it occurs only with conscious awareness.

@philipthrift

[Jason Resch]

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 3:20 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 1:51:15 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/16/2019 11:59 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 1:42:41 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

But then "panpyschism" does no work.  It's just a hypothetical property of matter that says if some matter does information processing then that matter is conscious, otherwise it's not.  But that's already what materialists thought.

Well said.

Telmo.

But a robot - which is matter - that is doing very advanced, high-level information processing - could be a winner on Jeopardy, and talk to you in a conversation, could be a zombie.

Are you a zombie?

Not if human-level intelligent behavior is a mark of consciousness.   How do you tell if someone is conscious?

Brent

There is the paper I posted here earlier. Here's the conclusion. Do you have something better?

Information and the Origin of Qualia

Roger Orpwood

Centre for Pain Research, Department for Health, University of Bath

...

Despite the overwhelming likelihood that all higher animals experience a degree of consciousness, the only animals we can be a 100% certain about are humans.

I don't see how we can be 100% certain of this, without limiting the domain of humans to the self.

 

Therefore it is necessary ultimately to measure activity in humans that underpins conscious experience. For the theory presented here that evidence has to come from monitoring the activity of networks of individual cells, with sub-millisecond resolution, to see how they behave during conscious acts and how that differs to unconscious acts.

How do they know what they think are unconscious acts aren't actually conscious but disconnected from the parts of the brain that can speak?  Like split brain patients having two independently consciousness hemispheres.

Jason

 

Such work would necessarily have to remove co-varying activity relating to such things as allocation of attention, activity relating to the reporting process, anticipation, etc. Techniques for population monitoring are of course developing fast, with the pioneering use of 2-photon calcium imaging. At present this technique is not quite fast enough to explore the detail firing activity of cells in networks but this is surely not far off. In the first instance such techniques can be usefully used with higher mammals who are strongly suspected of having conscious experience. Strong pointers would result from monitoring local activity such as that described in this article as the animal indicated a perception as opposed to not indicating a perception. If in parallel with such measurements a signature of that activity could be defined using EEG, MEG or ECoG that would enable human experiments to look for those signatures. Ultimately though it will be necessary to find a technique that can be used in humans, perhaps an ethically acceptable form of light imaging, that can detect the local activity described and to show that it occurs only with conscious awareness.

@philipthrift

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[Brent Meeker]

On 5/17/2019 4:56 AM, John Clark wrote:

If you somehow knew for a fact a brilliant being was a zombie then you could immediately make one conclusion about it, the being could NOT be the product of Darwinian Evolution because Natural Selection can see intelligence but it can't see consciousness in others any better than we can, and it can't select for something it can't see.

I don't see how that follows.  If zombies are possible then evolution could have produced brilliant zombies.  It might just be an accident that evolution took the "consciousness" path at some point.  It might even vary from species to species...as it might in the future when we develop human-level  in AI-robots.   I can't imagine how an AI could have human level intelligence without the ability to reflect on itself, but I can imagine this reflection being realized in very different ways.  For example, for high reliability in some space vehicles, we have provided three separate computers programmed by different teams to check decisions by majority voting.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 2:45:54 PM UTC-5, Jason wrote:

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 3:20 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 1:51:15 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/16/2019 11:59 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 1:42:41 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

But then "panpyschism" does no work.  It's just a hypothetical property of matter that says if some matter does information processing then that matter is conscious, otherwise it's not.  But that's already what materialists thought.

Well said.

Telmo.

But a robot - which is matter - that is doing very advanced, high-level information processing - could be a winner on Jeopardy, and talk to you in a conversation, could be a zombie.

Are you a zombie?

Not if human-level intelligent behavior is a mark of consciousness.   How do you tell if someone is conscious?

Brent

There is the paper I posted here earlier. Here's the conclusion. Do you have something better?

Information and the Origin of Qualia

Roger Orpwood

Centre for Pain Research, Department for Health, University of Bath

...

Despite the overwhelming likelihood that all higher animals experience a degree of consciousness, the only animals we can be a 100% certain about are humans.

I don't see how we can be 100% certain of this, without limiting the domain of humans to the self.

 

Therefore it is necessary ultimately to measure activity in humans that underpins conscious experience. For the theory presented here that evidence has to come from monitoring the activity of networks of individual cells, with sub-millisecond resolution, to see how they behave during conscious acts and how that differs to unconscious acts.

How do they know what they think are unconscious acts aren't actually conscious but disconnected from the parts of the brain that can speak?  Like split brain patients having two independently consciousness hemispheres.

Jason

 

Such work would necessarily have to remove co-varying activity relating to such things as allocation of attention, activity relating to the reporting process, anticipation, etc. Techniques for population monitoring are of course developing fast, with the pioneering use of 2-photon calcium imaging. At present this technique is not quite fast enough to explore the detail firing activity of cells in networks but this is surely not far off. In the first instance such techniques can be usefully used with higher mammals who are strongly suspected of having conscious experience. Strong pointers would result from monitoring local activity such as that described in this article as the animal indicated a perception as opposed to not indicating a perception. If in parallel with such measurements a signature of that activity could be defined using EEG, MEG or ECoG that would enable human experiments to look for those signatures. Ultimately though it will be necessary to find a technique that can be used in humans, perhaps an ethically acceptable form of light imaging, that can detect the local activity described and to show that it occurs only with conscious awareness.

@philipthrift

cf: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2018.00017/full

It seems that consciousness is something that one knows is where oneself is,  but don't know if it is (there is a test for it being) anywhere else!

@philipthrift 

[Brent Meeker]

On 5/16/2019 11:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 5:14:46 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 1:48 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Information processing absent actual first-class entities of qualia (or experiences) can only produce zombies. One needs information processing operating in a material substrate where those entities are available to be combined and manipulated.

So something can behave intelligently but if it is lacking "first-class entities of qualia" it can only be a intelligent zombie. But "first-class qualia" sounds like  consciousness to me, so you're basically saying only conscious things can be conscious. A tautology has the virtue of always being true but it involves a unnecessary non-required pointless repetition and reiteration of words where you end up at the exact same place you started with. And that is typical of all consciousness theories.

John K Clark

To be clearer: Qualia (the "ingredients" of consciousness) cannot be reduced to information processing.

That's nothing but unsupported assertion.  It's not even clear what "reduced" means in that context. 

(That is what I mean by "first-class". If qualia could  be reduced to information processing, then they would derivative from information, or "second-class".)

Is life derivative from chemistry?  Only within a certain environment.  Same with information processing.  In general it's streams of bits being processed being changed according to some algorithm.  But it's qualia if the streams are in some entity whose environment and actions give meaning to the information, like "I've got a headache and I'm going to lie down."

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

Certainly we (AI engineers) can continue to hack together increasingly "intelligent" robots out of conventional processing technology. They are all zombies (in the sense they are not conscious). A "creative" robot may be a challenge.

@philipthrift

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

Isn't  qualia can be reduced to information processing  the unsupported assertion?

The burden of proof is on those who claim qualia comes out of information processing.

If that claim were true, then any IP system - like a smartphone that can execute programs - can have human-type qualia existing inside it.

@philipthrift

 

[John Clark]

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 6:06 PM 'Brent Meeker' <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 5/17/2019 4:56 AM, John Clark wrote:

>> If you somehow knew for a fact a brilliant being was a zombie then you could immediately make one conclusion about it, the being could NOT be the product of Darwinian Evolution because Natural Selection can see intelligence but it can't see consciousness in others any better than we can, and it can't select for something it can't see.

> I don't see how that follows.  If zombies are possible then evolution could have produced brilliant zombies.  It might just be an accident that evolution took the "consciousness" path at some point. 

Even if we got super mega ultra lucky and Evolution just happened to produce a mutated gene that gave a being consciousness it would be lost in just a few generations due to genetic drift because however much we may value consciousness natural selection can't see it or hear it or touch it or detect it or be effected by it in any way. Genetic Drift is the reason cave animals have no eyes, their ancestors had eyes but once they got trapped in pitch dark caves the gene that produced eyes no longer had any survival value. Outside the cave a mutation that stopped the eye producing gene from working would be fatal to an animal, but inside the cave it would be an advantage, expensive resources used to make that eye could be used for other more productive  things, like having more offspring.

But unlike consciousness natural selection can see and detect and be effected by behavior, and animals with intelligent behavior get more of their genes into the next generation than animals with less intelligent behavior. And it is beyond dispute that random mutation and natural selection managed to produce a conscious being at least once, and although unproven it may have done it more than once, perhaps many billions of times; therefore it is logical for me to conclude that consciousness and intelligence are linked and consciousness is a unavoidable byproduct of intelligence, it is just the way data feels like when it is being processed.   

John K Clark 

[Brent Meeker]

On 5/17/2019 3:33 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 5:21:41 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/16/2019 11:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 5:14:46 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 1:48 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Information processing absent actual first-class entities of qualia (or experiences) can only produce zombies. One needs information processing operating in a material substrate where those entities are available to be combined and manipulated.

So something can behave intelligently but if it is lacking "first-class entities of qualia" it can only be a intelligent zombie. But "first-class qualia" sounds like  consciousness to me, so you're basically saying only conscious things can be conscious. A tautology has the virtue of always being true but it involves a unnecessary non-required pointless repetition and reiteration of words where you end up at the exact same place you started with. And that is typical of all consciousness theories.

John K Clark

To be clearer: Qualia (the "ingredients" of consciousness) cannot be reduced to information processing.

That's nothing but unsupported assertion.  It's not even clear what "reduced" means in that context. 

(That is what I mean by "first-class". If qualia could  be reduced to information processing, then they would derivative from information, or "second-class".)

Is life derivative from chemistry?  Only within a certain environment.  Same with information processing.  In general it's streams of bits being processed being changed according to some algorithm.  But it's qualia if the streams are in some entity whose environment and actions give meaning to the information, like "I've got a headache and I'm going to lie down."

Brent

Isn't  qualia can be reduced to information processing  the unsupported assertion?

No.  It's very well supported.  Interfere with information processing by drugs or electrical stimulus of the brain and qualia are changed or eliminated.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 5/17/2019 3:38 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 6:06 PM 'Brent Meeker' <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 5/17/2019 4:56 AM, John Clark wrote:

>> If you somehow knew for a fact a brilliant being was a zombie then you could immediately make one conclusion about it, the being could NOT be the product of Darwinian Evolution because Natural Selection can see intelligence but it can't see consciousness in others any better than we can, and it can't select for something it can't see.

> I don't see how that follows.  If zombies are possible then evolution could have produced brilliant zombies.  It might just be an accident that evolution took the "consciousness" path at some point. 

Even if we got super mega ultra lucky and Evolution just happened to produce a mutated gene that gave a being consciousness it would be lost in just a few generations due to genetic drift because however much we may value consciousness natural selection can't see it or hear it or touch it or detect it or be effected by it in any way.

But that assumes consciousness has some cost in terms of survival and reproduction.  Maybe it's just a spandrel.  Or maybe it has a function in the way human intelligence is implemented, but it wouldn't have a function is some other implementation.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

Information processing (IP) is necessary for consciousness, but IP has to occur in a substrate that produces qualia. Stop the IP and you stop consciousness. But the same IP in a different substrate could be consciousnessless.  

The above substate is the material of the brain: neurons, neurochemistry, glia, ...

A simulation of gravity running in a smartphone does not produce gravity.

People talk of telepathy and precognition as delusional - broadly speaking, it is. But the "IP delusion" (that consciousness is substate-independent IP) is up there.

@philipthrift

[Jason Resch]

On Saturday, May 18, 2019, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 6:09:18 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/17/2019 3:33 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 5:21:41 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/16/2019 11:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 5:14:46 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 1:48 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Information processing absent actual first-class entities of qualia (or experiences) can only produce zombies. One needs information processing operating in a material substrate where those entities are available to be combined and manipulated.

So something can behave intelligently but if it is lacking "first-class entities of qualia" it can only be a intelligent zombie. But "first-class qualia" sounds like  consciousness to me, so you're basically saying only conscious things can be conscious. A tautology has the virtue of always being true but it involves a unnecessary non-required pointless repetition and reiteration of words where you end up at the exact same place you started with. And that is typical of all consciousness theories.

John K Clark

To be clearer: Qualia (the "ingredients" of consciousness) cannot be reduced to information processing.

That's nothing but unsupported assertion.  It's not even clear what "reduced" means in that context. 

(That is what I mean by "first-class". If qualia could  be reduced to information processing, then they would derivative from information, or "second-class".)

Is life derivative from chemistry?  Only within a certain environment.  Same with information processing.  In general it's streams of bits being processed being changed according to some algorithm.  But it's qualia if the streams are in some entity whose environment and actions give meaning to the information, like "I've got a headache and I'm going to lie down."

Brent

Isn't  qualia can be reduced to information processing  the unsupported assertion?

No.  It's very well supported.  Interfere with information processing by drugs or electrical stimulus of the brain and qualia are changed or eliminated.

Brent

Information processing (IP) is necessary for consciousness, but IP has to occur in a substrate that produces qualia. Stop the IP and you stop consciousness. But the same IP in a different substrate could be consciousnessless.  

Maybe you're the only person in the world with the right gene mutation to synthesize the right protein that is a substrate for consciousness, and all the other philosophers of consciousness who came before you and wrote books on consciousness were pzombies that had no idea about what consciousness was.

You might consider this situation ridiculous, but it's exactly what you get when you introduce substrate dependence.  A simulated human brain could describe it's back pain in every detail, write whole paragraphs about what it's like, while according to the theory of substrate dependence, it knows nothing of what it's writing about. Where then does this knowledge if pain come from when the AI writes a page about the back pain it is in?

 

The above substate is the material of the brain: neurons, neurochemistry, glia, ...

A simulation of gravity running in a smartphone does not produce gravity.

Simulating the processing of information does produce processed information.  Consciousness might be like multiplication. There's no way to simulate it without actually doing it.

Jason

 

People talk of telepathy and precognition as delusional - broadly speaking, it is. But the "IP delusion" (that consciousness is substate-independent IP) is up there.

@philipthrift

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[Philip Thrift]

A simulated human brain could read the Wikipedia article on pain [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain ] and integrate this knowledge into its knowledge base, but it could not experience pain.

@philipthrift

[Jason Resch]

Let's consider a simulated brain that is identical to yours, not one that's read Wikipedia.

We might imagine having two identical copies of a person, one with a biological brain and another with a functionally identical (but non-biological) artificial brain. If weak AI is true, then the artificial brain lacks any conscious awareness, but surprisingly, it would still provide just as 

much information about its (non-existent) mental states as the biological brain would.

Consider if we provided the same exact stimulus of back pain to each of the two brains, and then provided each a questionnaire to fill out, asking them to:

1. Rate the intensity of the pain on a scale from 1 to 10

2. Chose which of these words best describes the pain: dull, sharp, burning

3. Write a few paragraphs detailing how the pain makes them feel

Owing to the behavioral equivalence between the two brains, we would find both the biological and non-biological brains provide the exact same answers, for these questions or any others we might choose to ask. But then we can’t help to wonder, as Minsky did, how does the non-biological 

brain, which supposedly has no access to consciousness experience, know so much about what the pain is like and how it makes them feel?

Jason

 

@philipthrift

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[Brent Meeker]

Mere supposition.  It's just the complement of the claim that machines can never really think.  A pathetic hubris.

A simulation of gravity running in a smartphone does not produce gravity.

It does in the simulated world.

Brent

People talk of telepathy and precognition as delusional - broadly speaking, it is. But the "IP delusion" (that consciousness is substate-independent IP) is up there.

@philipthrift

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[John Clark]

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 7:12 PM 'Brent Meeker'  <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> Even if we got super mega ultra lucky and Evolution just happened to produce a mutated gene that gave a being consciousness it would be lost in just a few generations due to genetic drift because however much we may value consciousness natural selection can't see it or hear it or touch it or detect it or be effected by it in any way.

> But that assumes consciousness has some cost in terms of survival and reproduction. 

Even if  it was neutral and the cost was zero a gene that did nothing but generate consciousness would soon disappear due to genetic drift; errors in dupacation always happen and the consciousness gene would accumulate such errors because they would not reduce the survival chances of the animal that had them , and after a few generations the gene would have so many errors it would stop working entirely.

Of course it's possible that I won the lottery and out of the 7.6 billion people on the planet I have the fewest errors in my consciousness gene, I have the only one that still works. It could be, but somehow I don't think so. 

> Maybe it's just a spandrel. 

I don't think there is any maybe about it. I am conscious and if I am the product of Darwinian Evolution then consciousness MUST be a spandrel.

Or maybe it has a function in the way human intelligence is implemented, but it wouldn't have a function is some other implementation.

Evolution is unlikely to have stumbled upon a complex method of achieving intelligence if there was a much simpler basic procedure to do the same thing, therefore if we use Occam's razor we must conclude if a robot is intelligent the best hypothesis is it's conscious too. To put it another way, it would be harder (probably infinitely harder) to make a brilliant non-conscious AI than to make a brilliant conscious AI.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 9:37 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

A simulated human brain could read the Wikipedia article on pain [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain ] and integrate this knowledge into its knowledge base, but it could not experience pain.

It's weird, perhaps it comes from watching too much Star Trek but I don't understand why so many people believe it's inherently more difficult  to produce emotion than intelligence when Evolution found the exact opposite to be true. 

John K Clark

 

[Philip Thrift]

The simulation-reality idea - that a simulated brain is the same as a naturally-evolved/material or synthetic/material brain - is worse even than the telepathy idea (which I don't think exists in any significant way anyway).

The first is really much worse than the second, so the first cannot throw stones (even simulated ones).

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

On 5/18/2019 6:37 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

A simulated human brain could describe it's back pain in every detail, write whole paragraphs about what it's like, while according to the theory of substrate dependence, it knows nothing of what it's writing about. Where then does this knowledge if pain come from when the AI writes a page about the back pain it is in?

A simulated human brain could read the Wikipedia article on pain [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain ] and integrate this knowledge into its knowledge base, but it could not experience pain.

How do you know this so-called fact?

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

My main point is that those who say it can (I say it can't) can't talk about telepathy, precognition, astral projection etc. being crazy.

@philipthrift

 

[Jason Resch]

Perhaps you could be so kind as to point out where we erred?

Jason 

[Philip Thrift]

It's not erring, so much as I think it's completely unuseful (of no practical value, unhelpful).

It's like the simulation hypothesis that comes up surprisingly often in science writing:

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-matrix-do-we-live-in-a-simulation-2019-4

'The Matrix' hit theaters 20 years ago. Many scientists and philosophers still think we're living in a simulation.

That's just one recent example one can find in science news on the "simulation hypothesis".

The "simulated brain could be conscious" idea is similar to the "simulation hypothesis" idea.

I think both are completely useless (and while there is a lot of critics of these, those of the faith in them them are not convinced by their arguments).

 Are they wrong? Ultimately one can't say anything is right or wrong.

But they are useless, as far as I can see.

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

Evolution of humans on Earth combined (synthesized) a very different set of materials than that  which computer engineers have used to make what is today's conventional computer hardware.

 @philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

On 5/18/2019 9:32 AM, John Clark wrote:

Or maybe it has a function in the way human intelligence is implemented, but it wouldn't have a function is some other implementation.

Evolution is unlikely to have stumbled upon a complex method of achieving intelligence if there was a much simpler basic procedure to do the same thing

You must not have looked at how DNA is use to code for proteins.  There are huge strecthes DNA that are just unused copies of other segments.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 6:19 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> It's weird, perhaps it comes from watching too much Star Trek but I don't understand why so many people believe it's inherently more difficult  to produce emotion than intelligence when Evolution found the exact opposite to be true. 

> Evolution of humans on Earth combined (synthesized) a very different set of materials than that  which computer engineers have used to make what is today's conventional computer hardware.

So there is something about the element carbon that makes it conscious that the element silicon lacks. Well maybe. Any maybe there is something about men that makes them conscious that women lack.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 7:54 PM 'Brent Meeker <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>>Evolution is unlikely to have stumbled upon a complex method of achieving intelligence if there was a much simpler basic procedure to do the same thing

> You must not have looked at how DNA is use to code for proteins.  There are huge strecthes DNA that are just unused copies of other segments.

I am well aware that there are huge sections of DNA that just repeat the same thing for hundreds or even thousands of times,  but I don't see the relevance because if they just repeat the same short phrase over and over then they contain no information.  And there are other DNA sections that once were genes but over the eons have been turned off (such as genes in birds that once produced teeth in their ancestors). These sections don't do anything anymore and the way we know they no longer do anything is that the variation from individual to individual in those sections is much much greater than the variation in the parts that still have a purpose. Because they do nothing Natural Selection can't edit out errors in DNA duplication so they accumulate from generation to generation.   

John K Clark

 

[Brent Meeker]

You keeps saying it's a terrible idea...but you never given any argument to support that.  Simply repeating something isn't convincing.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

No, but I can talk about them as tested and disproven.

Brent

@philipthrift

 

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[Brent Meeker]

On 5/18/2019 3:10 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

It's not erring, so much as I think it's completely unuseful (of no practical value, unhelpful).

The contrary, which you advocate, is essentially to assume that however intelligent and human-like you make a robot, it has no feelings.  This certainly has the "useful" consequence that it should not be granted any civil rights.  So the position that a sufficiently human-like robot can be treated as an unfeeling slave would certainly be commercially useful.  Is that what you mean by the contrary being "unusefull"?

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

Right.  So if consciousness just supervenes on intelligent computation, natural selection couldn't act on it and it could persist.  I don't think this is particularly likely.  But I do think there may be different kinds of intelligent computation and correspondingly different kinds of consciousness.  The octopus may be a natural example.  Their behavior is quite intelligent, but 2/3 of their neurons are in their tentacles and the tentacles appear to be able to act independently.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

This is exactly like those who say everything is consciousness, and telepathy is real, etc.

No I can't prove we aren't simulations, or that a simulation running in a big computer made of Intel Cores can't be conscious.

All those things: We are nothing but consciousness. We are simulations. A program running in a computer composed of a zillion Intel Core processors can be conscious.

Are are just plain woo woo.

People can believe any woo they want, of course.

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

No, it is not.  That consciousness depends on function of the brain is a well supported empirical observation.  That telepathy doesn't exist is a well tested and failed proposition.

No I can't prove we aren't simulations, or that a simulation running in a big computer made of Intel Cores can't be conscious.

Nor can you give a reply to Chalmer's fading consciousness problem.

All those things: We are nothing but consciousness. We are simulations. A program running in a computer composed of a zillion Intel Core processors can be conscious.

Now you're just throwing stuff in the air.  You forgot Donald Trump is rich.  Trickle down economics.

Are are just plain woo woo.

One more repetition.

Brent

People can believe any woo they want, of course.

@philipthrift

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[Philip Thrift]

On Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 1:50:03 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/18/2019 11:25 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

No I can't prove we aren't simulations, or that a simulation running in a big computer made of Intel Cores can't be conscious.

Nor can you give a reply to Chalmer's fading consciousness problem.

http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html :

for a system to be conscious it must have the right sort of biochemical makeup; if so, a metallic robot or a silicon-based computer could never have experiences, no matter what its causal organization 

That from David Chalmer's paper is the only good takeaway. 

And it's he only thing engineers need to pay attention to, Now AI engineers just want to make smart robots, not conscious robots. But if they did, then that above is all that matters.

(In any case, I don't think Chalmers himself believes in what he wrote in papers 25 years ago, per Philip Goff.)

@philipthrift 

[Philip Thrift]

I should say above, AI engineers want to make functionally-smart robots. That's a better word.

Back in the '80s I was working on autonomous smart weapons, or autonomous smart missiles, which could "see" on their own and make decisions  (I sort of hate say.) That was DARPA's name.

If a smart missile were conscious, It would be committing suicide.

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

On 5/19/2019 12:19 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 1:50:03 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/18/2019 11:25 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

No I can't prove we aren't simulations, or that a simulation running in a big computer made of Intel Cores can't be conscious.

Nor can you give a reply to Chalmer's fading consciousness problem.

http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html :

for a system to be conscious it must have the right sort of biochemical makeup; if so, a metallic robot or a silicon-based computer could never have experiences, no matter what its causal organization

A natural suggestion is that when experience arises from a physical system, it does so in virtue of the system's functional organization. On this view, the chemical and indeed the quantum substrates of the brain are not directly relevant to the existence of consciousness, although they may be indirectly relevant. What is central is rather the brain's abstract causal organization, an organization that might be realized in many different physical substrates.

In this paper I defend this view.

That from David Chalmer's paper is the only good takeaway.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 5/19/2019 1:21 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
> If a smart missile were conscious, It would be committing suicide.

Like a kamikaze.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 11:08 PM 'Brent Meeker' <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> I am well aware that there are huge sections of DNA that just repeat the same thing for hundreds or even thousands of times,  but I don't see the relevance because if they just repeat the same short phrase over and over then they contain no information.  And there are other DNA sections that once were genes but over the eons have been turned off (such as genes in birds that once produced teeth in their ancestors). These sections don't do anything anymore and the way we know they no longer do anything is that the variation from individual to individual in those sections is much much greater than the variation in the parts that still have a purpose. Because they do nothing Natural Selection can't edit out errors in DNA duplication so they accumulate from generation to generation.  

> Right.  So if consciousness just supervenes on intelligent computation, natural selection couldn't act on it

Natural Selection couldn't act directly on consciousness but it could do so indirectly through intelligent behavior.

> and it could persist. 

Yes, a mutated malfunctioning gene that prevented you from being intelligent would also prevent you from being conscious. But Natural Selection wouldn't care if a gene that did nothing but give you consciousness stopped working or not so the errors in it would keep increasing from generation to generation and degrading consciousness at the same time until there were so many errors the gene no longer worked at all and you have a intelligent zombie. And if that is the case then I must be astronomically lucky in having so few errors in my consciousness gene that it still works and it is extremely unlikely any of the other 7.6 billion people on the planet is as lucky as me.   

 

> I don't think this is particularly likely. 

Then you would have no alternative but to conclude it is not particularly likely Charles Darwin was right.

 

> But I do think there may be different kinds of intelligent computation and correspondingly different kinds of consciousness. 

Of course there are different types of intelligence, and if your consciousness was the same as mine then we'd be the same person. But the bottom line is you can have intelligent behavior without consciousness or you can't. If you can then you must take seriously the idea you are the only conscious being in the universe, if you can not then you must conclude that a intelligent machine is at least as conscious as you are and perhaps more so.

John K Clark

 

[Philip Thrift]

That was written in 1993. (In 2019, I don't think he himself defends this view.)

In any case, I read this "defense" like I read papers defending the existence of God.

@philipthrift

 

[Jason Resch]

A scientist should be thrilled to find something which might show the ideas he or she holds to be wrong, as it offers a chance to adopt a more correct view.  Recently I have seen a lot of people on this list telling others their idea is wrong, but not giving any reason or reasoning to justify that assertion.

This doesn't helping anyone. Telling someone else they are wrong without providing a reason won't get them to change their mind, if anything failing to provide a reason is just as likely to reinforce their belief. If you see or intuit something that someone else does not, I think it is best to either point out what it is they are missing or remain silent.

Jason

[Philip Thrift]

We know our brains, which we examine in science to be made of a complex configuration of cells, neurons and glial, with complex neurochemistry*, produces consciousness. That is the fact we know to be the case.

So it seems reasonable, from both a scientific and engineering stance, that a synthetic intelligence approach - one that combines synthetic-biological assembly with AI information processing to produce outputs that are actually living things - is the road to (synthetic) consciousness.

The belief that a conventional computer made of a zillion Intel Core chips with the right programming can be conscious is a religious belief, not a a scientific belief.

The burden of proof is on those with that belief to prove it, just as the burden of proof is on those with the belief that God exists to prove that.

* neurochemistry like the recently reported role of SATB2-expressing neurons in the processing of taste.

SATB2: "SATB2 is a 733 amino-acid homeodomain-containing human protein with a molecular weight of 82.5 kDa encoded by the SATB2 gene on 2q33."

@philipthrift

[Jason Resch]

On Sunday, May 19, 2019, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 2:40:04 PM UTC-5, Jason wrote:

On Sun, May 19, 2019 at 1:21 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 10:13:22 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/19/2019 12:19 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 1:50:03 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/18/2019 11:25 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

No I can't prove we aren't simulations, or that a simulation running in a big computer made of Intel Cores can't be conscious.

Nor can you give a reply to Chalmer's fading consciousness problem.

http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html :

for a system to be conscious it must have the right sort of biochemical makeup; if so, a metallic robot or a silicon-based computer could never have experiences, no matter what its causal organization

A natural suggestion is that when experience arises from a physical system, it does so in virtue of the system's functional organization. On this view, the chemical and indeed the quantum substrates of the brain are not directly relevant to the existence of consciousness, although they may be indirectly relevant. What is central is rather the brain's abstract causal organization, an organization that might be realized in many different physical substrates.

In this paper I defend this view.

That from David Chalmer's paper is the only good takeaway.

Brent

 

That was written in 1993. (In 2019, I don't think he himself defends this view.)

In any case, I read this "defense" like I read papers defending the existence of God.

A scientist should be thrilled to find something which might show the ideas he or she holds to be wrong, as it offers a chance to adopt a more correct view.  Recently I have seen a lot of people on this list telling others their idea is wrong, but not giving any reason or reasoning to justify that assertion.

This doesn't helping anyone. Telling someone else they are wrong without providing a reason won't get them to change their mind, if anything failing to provide a reason is just as likely to reinforce their belief. If you see or intuit something that someone else does not, I think it is best to either point out what it is they are missing or remain silent.

Jason

Philip,

I commend you for providing your reasons below. Thank you.

 

We know our brains, which we examine in science to be made of a complex configuration of cells, neurons and glial, with complex neurochemistry*, produces consciousness. That is the fact we know to be the case.

Yes, I agree.

 

So it seems reasonable, from both a scientific and engineering stance, that a synthetic intelligence approach - one that combines synthetic-biological assembly with AI information processing to produce outputs that are actually living things - is the road to (synthetic) consciousness.

The belief that a conventional computer made of a zillion Intel Core chips with the right programming can be conscious is a religious belief, not a a scientific belief.

You could say it is a hypothesis for which we currently have no direct evidence for.  Is there anything you would consider evidence?  If a synthetic Android claimed to be conscious would this be evidence that would convince you? If not, what evidence could convince you?

 

The burden of proof is on those with that belief to prove it, just as the burden of proof is on those with the belief that God exists to prove that.

I think the burden rests equally on those holding either that "synthetic brains cannot be conscious" as "synthetic brains can be conscious".

The reason I lean towards the second camp, is that the former leads to very strange situations: pzombies that complain about pain, Androids who argue that they're conscious, planets with zombies (of a different neuro chemistry) who nonetheless write books on consciousness, fading qualia, and qualia that "dance" (disappear and reappear) due to presence or absence of a few synthetic neurons.

I am not aware of anything quite so strange resulting from a belief in synthetic consciousness. Sure it is strange that a billion Intel chips could be conscious, but no more strange than the idea that a heap of oil droplets squirting ions back and forth could be conscious.

Anyway that's how I got to where I am.

Jason

 

* neurochemistry like the recently reported role of SATB2-expressing neurons in the processing of taste.

SATB2: "SATB2 is a 733 amino-acid homeodomain-containing human protein with a molecular weight of 82.5 kDa encoded by the SATB2 gene on 2q33."

@philipthrift

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[Brent Meeker]

On 5/19/2019 1:39 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

So it seems reasonable, from both a scientific and engineering stance, that a synthetic intelligence approach - one that combines synthetic-biological assembly with AI information processing to produce outputs that are actually living things - is the road to (synthetic) consciousness.

It seems reasonable it will produce consciousness.  But that doesn't show that consciousness cannot be produced using different materials.

The belief that a conventional computer made of a zillion Intel Core chips with the right programming can be conscious is a religious belief, not a a scientific belief.

That's just your repeated attempt to insult others.  It adds not thing to your argument.  You seem to be the one asserting that there is a mysterious experiential property of carbon atoms as a matter of faith.

The burden of proof is on those with that belief to prove it, just as the burden of proof is on those with the belief that God exists to prove that.

And they are working to meet it by producing human level AI using electronic computers.  How will you prove their AI is not conscious?

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

We do know that some synthetic-biological objects (SBOs) exist that are conscious: Us.

Except here the material synthesis was accomplished via natural selection, not bay a team of scientists and engineers.

An android that came with a resume outlining its manufacturing via sufficiently synthetic-biological processes and said "I am conscious" might be believed. We could cut it open, but that would not be nice.

There are several alternatives to our biochemistry, of course [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry ], even involving silicon*. (This is about the 20th time I have posted this.)

But I claim that no zillion-processor Intel Core computer (that ultimately runs programs compiled to Intel machine code) can be conscious. I also claim God does not exist.

It is this context that [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room ] is correct.

"The Chinese room argument holds that an executing program cannot [have] consciousness, regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave."

* Silicon biochemistry

See also: Organosilicon

Structure of silane, analog of methane

Structure of the silicone polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)

Marine diatoms—carbon-based organisms that extract silicon from sea water, in the form of its oxide (silica) and incorporate it into their cell walls

The silicon atom has been much discussed as the basis for an alternative biochemical system, because silicon has many chemical properties similar to those of carbon and is in the same group of the periodic table, the carbon group. Like carbon, silicon can create molecules that are sufficiently large to carry biological information.^[10]

However, silicon has several drawbacks as an alternative to carbon. Silicon, unlike carbon, lacks the ability to form chemical bonds with diverse types of atoms as is necessary for the chemical versatility required for metabolism, and yet this precise inability is what makes silicon less susceptible to bond with all sorts of impurities from which carbon, in comparison, is not shielded. Elements creating organic functional groups with carbon include hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and metals such as iron, magnesium, and zinc. Silicon, on the other hand, interacts with very few other types of atoms.^[10] Moreover, where it does interact with other atoms, silicon creates molecules that have been described as "monotonous compared with the combinatorial universe of organic macromolecules".^[10] This is because silicon atoms are much bigger, having a larger mass and atomic radius, and so have difficulty forming double bonds (the double-bonded carbon is part of the carbonyl group, a fundamental motif of carbon-based bio-organic chemistry).

Silanes, which are chemical compoundsof hydrogen and silicon that are analogous to the alkane hydrocarbons, are highly reactive with water, and long-chain silanes spontaneously decompose. Molecules incorporating polymers of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms instead of direct bonds between silicon, known collectively as silicones, are much more stable. It has been suggested that silicone-based chemicals would be more stable than equivalent hydrocarbons in a sulfuric-acid-rich environment, as is found in some extraterrestrial locations.^[11]

Of the varieties of molecules identified in the interstellar medium as of 1998, 84 are based on carbon, while only 8 are based on silicon.^[12] Moreover, of those 8 compounds, 4 also include carbon within them. The cosmic abundance of carbon to silicon is roughly 10 to 1. This may suggest a greater variety of complex carbon compounds throughout the cosmos, providing less of a foundation on which to build silicon-based biologies, at least under the conditions prevalent on the surface of planets. Also, even though Earth and other terrestrial planets are exceptionally silicon-rich and carbon-poor (the relative abundance of silicon to carbon in Earth's crust is roughly 925:1), terrestrial life is carbon-based. The fact that carbon is used instead of silicon may be evidence that silicon is poorly suited for biochemistry on Earth-like planets. Reasons for which may be that silicon is less versatile than carbon in forming compounds, that the compounds formed by silicon are unstable, and that it blocks the flow of heat.^[13]

Even so, biogenic silica is used by some Earth life, such as the silicate skeletal structure of diatoms. According to the clay hypothesis of A. G. Cairns-Smith, silicate minerals in water played a crucial role in abiogenesis: they replicated their crystal structures, interacted with carbon compounds, and were the precursors of carbon-based life.^[14][15]

Although not observed in nature, carbon–silicon bonds have been added to biochemistry by using directed evolution (artificial selection). A heme containing cytochrome c protein from Rhodothermus marinus has been engineered using directed evolution to catalyze the formation of new carbon–silicon bonds between hydrosilanes and diazo compounds.^[16]

Silicon compounds may possibly be biologically useful under temperatures or pressures different from the surface of a terrestrial planet, either in conjunction with or in a role less directly analogous to carbon. Polysilanols, the silicon compounds corresponding to sugars, are soluble in liquid nitrogen, suggesting that they could play a role in very-low-temperature biochemistry.^[17][18]

In cinematic and literary science fiction, at a moment when man-made machines cross from nonliving to living, it is often posited,^{[by whom?]} this new form would be the first example of non-carbon-based life. Since the advent of the microprocessor in the late 1960s, these machines are often classed as computers (or computer-guided robots) and filed under "silicon-based life", even though the silicon backing matrix of these processors is not nearly as fundamental to their operation as carbon is for "wet life".

@philipthrift

[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 May 2019, at 00:21, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 5/16/2019 11:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 5:14:46 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 1:48 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Information processing absent actual first-class entities of qualia (or experiences) can only produce zombies. One needs information processing operating in a material substrate where those entities are available to be combined and manipulated.

So something can behave intelligently but if it is lacking "first-class entities of qualia" it can only be a intelligent zombie. But "first-class qualia" sounds like  consciousness to me, so you're basically saying only conscious things can be conscious. A tautology has the virtue of always being true but it involves a unnecessary non-required pointless repetition and reiteration of words where you end up at the exact same place you started with. And that is typical of all consciousness theories.

John K Clark

To be clearer: Qualia (the "ingredients" of consciousness) cannot be reduced to information processing.

That's nothing but unsupported assertion.  It's not even clear what "reduced" means in that context. 

Nor is “information processing”, but I guess it means some 3p number crunching.

With mechanism, qualia are not associated univocally with anything 3p describable. The arithmetical reality is full of truth about some machines not definable in term accessible by those machines. But the machines already knows that.

(That is what I mean by "first-class". If qualia could  be reduced to information processing, then they would derivative from information, or "second-class".)

Is life derivative from chemistry?  Only within a certain environment.  Same with information processing.  In general it's streams of bits being processed being changed according to some algorithm.  But it's qualia if the streams are in some entity whose environment and actions give meaning to the information, like "I've got a headache and I'm going to lie down.”

The meaning is the intended environment, but the machine canot decide if it is “real”, or a dream. I suspect you are using some magical quality of the environment, and it is unclear at this stage if this departs from mechanism or not. Nor is it clear if the environment needs to be physical, theological, or arithmetical.

A part of your insight makes a lot of sense, and is indeed what makes the difference between []p and []p & p, or []p & <>t. “p” add the reference to truth, in some meta local manner, and <>t refer to a reality (making the machine consistent), which plays the role of the “added” environment. G* proves that such nuances are equivalent, but G does not prove this, so the machine experiences them very differently ([]p & p imposes intuitionist logic, []p & <>t (p sigma_1) imposes quantum logic, etc.

Bruno 

Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 May 2019, at 00:33, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 5:21:41 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/16/2019 11:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 5:14:46 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 1:48 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Information processing absent actual first-class entities of qualia (or experiences) can only produce zombies. One needs information processing operating in a material substrate where those entities are available to be combined and manipulated.

So something can behave intelligently but if it is lacking "first-class entities of qualia" it can only be a intelligent zombie. But "first-class qualia" sounds like  consciousness to me, so you're basically saying only conscious things can be conscious. A tautology has the virtue of always being true but it involves a unnecessary non-required pointless repetition and reiteration of words where you end up at the exact same place you started with. And that is typical of all consciousness theories.

John K Clark

To be clearer: Qualia (the "ingredients" of consciousness) cannot be reduced to information processing.

That's nothing but unsupported assertion.  It's not even clear what "reduced" means in that context. 

(That is what I mean by "first-class". If qualia could  be reduced to information processing, then they would derivative from information, or "second-class".)

Is life derivative from chemistry?  Only within a certain environment.  Same with information processing.  In general it's streams of bits being processed being changed according to some algorithm.  But it's qualia if the streams are in some entity whose environment and actions give meaning to the information, like "I've got a headache and I'm going to lie down."

Brent

Isn't  qualia can be reduced to information processing  the unsupported assertion?

The burden of proof is on those who claim qualia comes out of information processing.

If that claim were true, then any IP system - like a smartphone that can execute programs - can have human-type qualia existing inside it.

It is not because some “information processing” could support consciousness that we can conclude that all information processing can support consciousness. You need at least one reflexive loop. You need two reflexive loop for having self-consciousness (Löbianity).

But the information processing is not enough, you need a reality, also, be it the arithmetical truth, or a physical phenomenologies which would be Turing universal.

The arithmetical truth must be understood as something beyond all information processing possible, as we know since Gödel and Tarski.

The advantage of mechanism is that we do have a theory: computer science (aka Recrusion theory, or Arithmetic).

That does not make Mechanism true, but it makes the problems amenable to mathematical formulation and testing.

Bruno

@philipthrift

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 May 2019, at 08:11, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 6:09:18 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/17/2019 3:33 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Friday, May 17, 2019 at 5:21:41 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/16/2019 11:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 5:14:46 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 1:48 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Information processing absent actual first-class entities of qualia (or experiences) can only produce zombies. One needs information processing operating in a material substrate where those entities are available to be combined and manipulated.

So something can behave intelligently but if it is lacking "first-class entities of qualia" it can only be a intelligent zombie. But "first-class qualia" sounds like  consciousness to me, so you're basically saying only conscious things can be conscious. A tautology has the virtue of always being true but it involves a unnecessary non-required pointless repetition and reiteration of words where you end up at the exact same place you started with. And that is typical of all consciousness theories.

John K Clark

To be clearer: Qualia (the "ingredients" of consciousness) cannot be reduced to information processing.

That's nothing but unsupported assertion.  It's not even clear what "reduced" means in that context. 

(That is what I mean by "first-class". If qualia could  be reduced to information processing, then they would derivative from information, or "second-class".)

Is life derivative from chemistry?  Only within a certain environment.  Same with information processing.  In general it's streams of bits being processed being changed according to some algorithm.  But it's qualia if the streams are in some entity whose environment and actions give meaning to the information, like "I've got a headache and I'm going to lie down."

Brent

Isn't  qualia can be reduced to information processing  the unsupported assertion?

No.  It's very well supported.  Interfere with information processing by drugs or electrical stimulus of the brain and qualia are changed or eliminated.

Brent

Information processing (IP) is necessary for consciousness, but IP has to occur in a substrate that produces qualia. Stop the IP and you stop consciousness. But the same IP in a different substrate could be consciousnessless.  

The above substate is the material of the brain: neurons, neurochemistry, glia, ...

A simulation of gravity running in a smartphone does not produce gravity.

A simulation of gravity+an observer produces the appearance of gravity for that observer, or you beg the question (by saying that a simulation of an observer does not produce an observer, but there are evidence that this is what a brain does, it simulates us already, as, we are definable by our character, beliefs, memories, etc.). You would say it is a zombie, but that is only a re-assertion of your credo that some matter is needed, and that Mechanism is false.

People talk of telepathy and precognition as delusional - broadly speaking, it is. But the "IP delusion" (that consciousness is substate-independent IP) is up there.

Or the idea of matter is up there. We really don’t know, but a there are more evidence for mechanism than for (primitive) matter (zero evidence until now).

Bruno 

@philipthrift

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[Jason Resch]

We do know that some synthetic-biological objects (SBOs) exist that are conscious: Us.

Except here the material synthesis was accomplished via natural selection, not bay a team of scientists and engineers.

Do you think if a team of engineers in a lab built a human from scratch, using the same materials, that it would be conscious?

 

An android that came with a resume outlining its manufacturing via sufficiently synthetic-biological processes and said "I am conscious" might be believed.

What if it were non-biological?

 

We could cut it open, but that would not be nice.

Your statement reminds me a bit of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjCytqku18M 

 

There are several alternatives to our biochemistry, of course [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry ], even involving silicon*. (This is about the 20th time I have posted this.)

But I claim that no zillion-processor Intel Core computer (that ultimately runs programs compiled to Intel machine code) can be conscious. I also claim God does not exist.

It is this context that [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room ] is correct. 

"The Chinese room argument holds that an executing program cannot [have] consciousness, regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave."

The Chinese Room Argument was thoroughly debunked by over a dozen critiquers before it was published.  It has numerous flaws, none of which were addressed between the time he received the critiques and when Searle published.  

A few examples:

• It confuses the "processor" for the system as a whole.  This would be like confusing the laws of physics for the human brain. The laws of physics is the substrate by which the brain states are processed and updated, but you would not ascribe the consciousness to the laws of physics.
• It assumes there is only one mind in the room, the human operator. But this quickly falls upon closer inspection, if you interview the "chinese speaking mind" you find that the opinions of this other mind are not the opinions of the english speaking human operator.

 

* Silicon biochemistry

See also: Organosilicon

Structure of silane, analog of methane

Structure of the silicone polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)

Marine diatoms—carbon-based organisms that extract silicon from sea water, in the form of its oxide (silica) and incorporate it into their cell walls

The silicon atom has been much discussed as the basis for an alternative biochemical system, because silicon has many chemical properties similar to those of carbon and is in the same group of the periodic table, the carbon group. Like carbon, silicon can create molecules that are sufficiently large to carry biological information.^[10]

However, silicon has several drawbacks as an alternative to carbon. Silicon, unlike carbon, lacks the ability to form chemical bonds with diverse types of atoms as is necessary for the chemical versatility required for metabolism, and yet this precise inability is what makes silicon less susceptible to bond with all sorts of impurities from which carbon, in comparison, is not shielded. Elements creating organic functional groups with carbon include hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and metals such as iron, magnesium, and zinc. Silicon, on the other hand, interacts with very few other types of atoms.^[10] Moreover, where it does interact with other atoms, silicon creates molecules that have been described as "monotonous compared with the combinatorial universe of organic macromolecules".^[10] This is because silicon atoms are much bigger, having a larger mass and atomic radius, and so have difficulty forming double bonds (the double-bonded carbon is part of the carbonyl group, a fundamental motif of carbon-based bio-organic chemistry).

Silanes, which are chemical compoundsof hydrogen and silicon that are analogous to the alkane hydrocarbons, are highly reactive with water, and long-chain silanes spontaneously decompose. Molecules incorporating polymers of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms instead of direct bonds between silicon, known collectively as silicones, are much more stable. It has been suggested that silicone-based chemicals would be more stable than equivalent hydrocarbons in a sulfuric-acid-rich environment, as is found in some extraterrestrial locations.^[11]

Of the varieties of molecules identified in the interstellar medium as of 1998, 84 are based on carbon, while only 8 are based on silicon.^[12] Moreover, of those 8 compounds, 4 also include carbon within them. The cosmic abundance of carbon to silicon is roughly 10 to 1. This may suggest a greater variety of complex carbon compounds throughout the cosmos, providing less of a foundation on which to build silicon-based biologies, at least under the conditions prevalent on the surface of planets. Also, even though Earth and other terrestrial planets are exceptionally silicon-rich and carbon-poor (the relative abundance of silicon to carbon in Earth's crust is roughly 925:1), terrestrial life is carbon-based. The fact that carbon is used instead of silicon may be evidence that silicon is poorly suited for biochemistry on Earth-like planets. Reasons for which may be that silicon is less versatile than carbon in forming compounds, that the compounds formed by silicon are unstable, and that it blocks the flow of heat.^[13]

Even so, biogenic silica is used by some Earth life, such as the silicate skeletal structure of diatoms. According to the clay hypothesis of A. G. Cairns-Smith, silicate minerals in water played a crucial role in abiogenesis: they replicated their crystal structures, interacted with carbon compounds, and were the precursors of carbon-based life.^[14][15]

Although not observed in nature, carbon–silicon bonds have been added to biochemistry by using directed evolution (artificial selection). A heme containing cytochrome c protein from Rhodothermus marinus has been engineered using directed evolution to catalyze the formation of new carbon–silicon bonds between hydrosilanes and diazo compounds.^[16]

Silicon compounds may possibly be biologically useful under temperatures or pressures different from the surface of a terrestrial planet, either in conjunction with or in a role less directly analogous to carbon. Polysilanols, the silicon compounds corresponding to sugars, are soluble in liquid nitrogen, suggesting that they could play a role in very-low-temperature biochemistry.^[17][18]

In cinematic and literary science fiction, at a moment when man-made machines cross from nonliving to living, it is often posited,^{[by whom?]} this new form would be the first example of non-carbon-based life. Since the advent of the microprocessor in the late 1960s, these machines are often classed as computers (or computer-guided robots) and filed under "silicon-based life", even though the silicon backing matrix of these processors is not nearly as fundamental to their operation as carbon is for "wet life".

Do you think there is something about the carbon atoms vs silicon atoms that is important to feeling? Can "carbon" atoms alone be happy or sad?   Can a carbon atom alone be alive?

I think carbon was selected because it can hold bonds with up to 4 other atoms, making it a useful atomic glue for large structures.  Things like life and consciousness do not exist at the atomic level, they are large scale processes that emerge from many complex interactions.  We know that a computer can replicate the processes and behaviors of any interaction, so long as it is finite.  This is evidence that a computer could fool us into thinking it is conscious, and that we could implement hybrid brains with biological and synthetic neurons. What then of the qualia of such functionally indistinguishable minds?

Jason

[John Clark]

On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 4:32 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

>The Chinese room argument holds that an executing program cannot [blah blah]

Philip, I'd really like to know why you think the Chinese room argument is not imbecilic. I'm also curious why you cut and pasted all that stuff about silicon biochemistry from Wikipedia.

 John K Clark 

[Philip Thrift]

On Monday, May 20, 2019 at 10:03:12 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 18 May 2019, at 00:33, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

Isn't  qualia can be reduced to information processing  the unsupported assertion?

The burden of proof is on those who claim qualia comes out of information processing.

If that claim were true, then any IP system - like a smartphone that can execute programs - can have human-type qualia existing inside it.

It is not because some “information processing” could support consciousness that we can conclude that all information processing can support consciousness. You need at least one reflexive loop. You need two reflexive loop for having self-consciousness (Löbianity).

But the information processing is not enough, you need a reality, also, be it the arithmetical truth, or a physical phenomenologies which would be Turing universal.

The arithmetical truth must be understood as something beyond all information processing possible, as we know since Gödel and Tarski.

The advantage of mechanism is that we do have a theory: computer science (aka Recrusion theory, or Arithmetic).

That does not make Mechanism true, but it makes the problems amenable to mathematical formulation and testing.

Bruno

 

A smartphone CPU, like Samsung's

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/13599/samsung-announces-8nm-exynos-9820-with-trigroup-cpu-design

can run any "Turing" program. 

So I still don't see from your description what exactly is missing for it to produce|execute human qualia?

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

On Monday, May 20, 2019 at 10:39:20 AM UTC-5, Jason wrote:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjCytqku18M 

That was interesting. Data has consciousness or doesn't. It's like being pregnant.

All examples of consciousness we have exist in living objects. (Us, for example.)

Can something be a conscious object but not a living object?

@philipthrift 

[Philip Thrift]

If a program (multi-core x86 code) running on a zillion-processor Intel Core computer can be conscious, then the proposition of "Chinese room" is wrong.

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

On Monday, May 20, 2019 at 12:46:13 PM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Monday, May 20, 2019 at 10:39:20 AM UTC-5, Jason wrote:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjCytqku18M 

That was interesting. Data has consciousness or doesn't. It's like being pregnant.

 

Data (in your video link) apparently is synthesized with positronic links:

       https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Positronic_link

What is the material composition of Data's positronic links?

@philipthrift

[Jason Resch]

On Monday, May 20, 2019, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, May 20, 2019 at 10:39:20 AM UTC-5, Jason wrote:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjCytqku18M 

That was interesting. Data has consciousness or doesn't. It's like being pregnant.

So what would you say to data, if he existed? That you're not conscious because every other conscious being that we know of is biological?

True but that's not evidence

 

Can something be a conscious object but not a living object?

Depending on your definition of life, yes, I think so.

Jason

 

@philipthrift 

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[Jason Resch]

I don't know. It's fictional, but I would say it doesn't matter. Who am I to tell someone else they are not conscious?

Jason 

[Philip Thrift]

On Monday, May 20, 2019 at 4:10:12 PM UTC-5, Jason wrote:

On Monday, May 20, 2019, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, May 20, 2019 at 10:39:20 AM UTC-5, Jason wrote:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjCytqku18M 

That was interesting. Data has consciousness or doesn't. It's like being pregnant.

So what would you say to data, if he existed? That you're not conscious because every other conscious being that we know of is biological?

 

All examples of consciousness we have exist in living objects. (Us, for example.)

True but that's not evidence

 

Can something be a conscious object but not a living object?

Depending on your definition of life, yes, I think so.

Jason

 

 

I was only just reading about Data's positronic technology. If positronics is like biopolymers being used to make synthetic neurons today, then Data could be conscious.

A non-living conscious being seems like a contradiction. I don't think Data would be both conscious and non-living. Data would be an example of life made of alternative biochemistry.

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

On 5/20/2019 10:46 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
> All examples of consciousness we have exist in living objects. (Us,
> for example.)
>
> Can something be a conscious object but not a living object?

So you're going to appeal to the elan' vital as necessary to consciousness?

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

Ghosts are conscious but non-living. (They are immaterial, in fact.)

So there are those, of course.

Consciousness inhabiting a zillion-processor Intel Core computer would indeed be like a ghost inhabiting it.

@philipthrift

[Jason Resch]

Life usually embodies aspects such as reproduction, metabolism, etc.  A mars rover or a Boltzmann brain would not meet the definition of alive, but could be conscious.

Jason

[Brent Meeker]

Of course we might eventually send a Mars rover that assembles copies of itself (with variation) from local materials in order to more thoroughly explore the planet.

Brent

Jason

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[John Clark]

On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 2:01 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> If a program (multi-core x86 code) running on a zillion-processor Intel Core computer can be conscious, then the proposition of "Chinese room" is wrong.

You want to prove that only wet squishy things can be conscious. You ask that little man (who happens to have a wet squishy brain) in that gigantic room if he is conscious on knowing Chinese and he says no. The only wet squishy thing in that humongous room is in the little man and you assume only wet squishy things can be conscious and so conclude that there is no consciousness of Chinese in that astronomically large room.

Assuming what you want to prove is not only wrong its STUPID. 

John K Clark 

[Philip Thrift]

So you read the synthetic biology technology literature? Living things are being made in labs today.

Engineering Microbial Living Therapeutics: The Synthetic Biology Toolbox

https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/fulltext/S0167-7799(18)30258-0

Living therapeutics have been engineered to diagnose diseases and produce and deliver therapeutics in situ. These therapeutics can be equipped with devices for sensing inputs, controlling gene expression, building memory, and producing and delivering an active compound. Ingenious devices responding to stress, temperature, quorum-sensing signals, and other small molecules have been built to control the production and delivery of therapeutic molecules. To deal with biosafety, some living therapeutics carry biocontainment devices based on cell auxotrophy, temperature-sensitive regulators, and toxin/antitoxin counteraction. Recent advances in synthetic biology greatly expanded the toolbox for engineering living therapeutics; however, new parts are still needed to help synthetic biologists engineer more diverse and fully functional living therapeutics. Microbes can be engineered to act like living therapeutics designed to perform specific actions in the human body. From fighting and preventing infections to eliminating tumors and treating metabolic disorders, engineered living systems are the next generation of therapeutics. In recent years, synthetic biologists have greatly expanded the genetic toolbox for microbial living therapeutics, adding sensors, regulators, memory circuits, delivery devices, and kill switches. These advances have paved the way for successful engineering of fully functional living therapeutics, with sensing, production, and biocontainment devices. However, some important tools are still missing from the box. In this review, we cover the most recent biological parts and approaches developed and describe the missing tools needed to build robust living therapeutics.

@philipthrift 

[Philip Thrift]

It's already been established how Data's positronics could be conscious. I don't know how "wet squishy" Data's positronics are.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Positronic_matrix

A positronic matrix was a significant part of an android's positronic brain, but could also be adapted for use in conjunction with a humanoid's brain.

When Data created his "daughter" Lal in 2366, during her development he observed some quantum variations, notably her use of contractions. Because her neural net was identical to Data's, he began to maintain records on her positronic matrix activity, behavioral norms, and verbal patterns. (TNG: "The Offspring") Lal subsequently "died" as a result of having an unstable positronic matrix.

 ...

@philipthrift 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 May 2019, at 03:34, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 5/18/2019 12:55 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Saturday, May 18, 2019 at 2:39:29 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/18/2019 6:37 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

A simulated human brain could describe it's back pain in every detail, write whole paragraphs about what it's like, while according to the theory of substrate dependence, it knows nothing of what it's writing about. Where then does this knowledge if pain come from when the AI writes a page about the back pain it is in?

A simulated human brain could read the Wikipedia article on pain [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain ] and integrate this knowledge into its knowledge base, but it could not experience pain.

How do you know this so-called fact?

Brent

My main point is that those who say it can (I say it can't) can't talk about telepathy, precognition, astral projection etc. being crazy.

No, but I can talk about them as tested and disproven.

Exactly.

But some people here talk like if they knew the truth, which is unscientific and even against any religion not based on literal reading of texst, but on experiences, experiments, and reflexion.

Of course, the 1500 years of temporal use (misuse) of theology does not help. It trains people in accepting authoritative arguments.

Bruno

Brent

@philipthrift

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 May 2019, at 17:13, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 5/19/2019 12:19 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 1:50:03 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/18/2019 11:25 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

No I can't prove we aren't simulations, or that a simulation running in a big computer made of Intel Cores can't be conscious.

Nor can you give a reply to Chalmer's fading consciousness problem.

http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html :

for a system to be conscious it must have the right sort of biochemical makeup; if so, a metallic robot or a silicon-based computer could never have experiences, no matter what its causal organization

A natural suggestion is that when experience arises from a physical system, it does so in virtue of the system's functional organization. On this view, the chemical and indeed the quantum substrates of the brain are not directly relevant to the existence of consciousness, although they may be indirectly relevant. What is central is rather the brain's abstract causal organization, an organization that might be realized in many different physical substrates.

And also in non physical reality, like the elementary arithmetical reality, which might not be a physical thing, despite being assumed and used in all physical theories. 

Bruno

In this paper I defend this view.

That from David Chalmer's paper is the only good takeaway.

Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 May 2019, at 22:39, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 2:40:04 PM UTC-5, Jason wrote:

On Sun, May 19, 2019 at 1:21 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 10:13:22 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/19/2019 12:19 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 1:50:03 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 5/18/2019 11:25 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

No I can't prove we aren't simulations, or that a simulation running in a big computer made of Intel Cores can't be conscious.

Nor can you give a reply to Chalmer's fading consciousness problem.

http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html :

for a system to be conscious it must have the right sort of biochemical makeup; if so, a metallic robot or a silicon-based computer could never have experiences, no matter what its causal organization

A natural suggestion is that when experience arises from a physical system, it does so in virtue of the system's functional organization. On this view, the chemical and indeed the quantum substrates of the brain are not directly relevant to the existence of consciousness, although they may be indirectly relevant. What is central is rather the brain's abstract causal organization, an organization that might be realized in many different physical substrates.

In this paper I defend this view.

That from David Chalmer's paper is the only good takeaway.

Brent

 

That was written in 1993. (In 2019, I don't think he himself defends this view.)

In any case, I read this "defense" like I read papers defending the existence of God.

A scientist should be thrilled to find something which might show the ideas he or she holds to be wrong, as it offers a chance to adopt a more correct view.  Recently I have seen a lot of people on this list telling others their idea is wrong, but not giving any reason or reasoning to justify that assertion.

This doesn't helping anyone. Telling someone else they are wrong without providing a reason won't get them to change their mind, if anything failing to provide a reason is just as likely to reinforce their belief. If you see or intuit something that someone else does not, I think it is best to either point out what it is they are missing or remain silent.

Jason

We know our brains, which we examine in science to be made of a complex configuration of cells, neurons and glial, with complex neurochemistry*, produces consciousness. That is the fact we know to be the case.

So it seems reasonable, from both a scientific and engineering stance, that a synthetic intelligence approach - one that combines synthetic-biological assembly with AI information processing to produce outputs that are actually living things - is the road to (synthetic) consciousness.

The belief that a conventional computer made of a zillion Intel Core chips with the right programming can be conscious is a religious belief, not a a scientific belief.

Any belief about some reality is a religious belief; to begin with the belief that some reality exist.

The burden of proof is on those with that belief to prove it, just as the burden of proof is on those with the belief that God exists to prove that.

Science never proves anything about reality. It proves propositions in theories about that reality, but the theories are not proved. They are given to be tested, and if possible refuted or improved.

In science, we don’t claim truth, especially on the fundamental reality. We only try theories, like plausibly Nature itself, through selection, mutation, etc.

Bruno

* neurochemistry like the recently reported role of SATB2-expressing neurons in the processing of taste.

SATB2: "SATB2 is a 733 amino-acid homeodomain-containing human protein with a molecular weight of 82.5 kDa encoded by the SATB2 gene on 2q33."

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

Which God?

It is this context that [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room ] is correct.

"The Chinese room argument holds that an executing program cannot [have] consciousness, regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave.”

The Chinese room argument is based on a misunderstanding of how a computer work. It has been refuted correctly by Dennett and Hofstadter, since long.

Bruno

* Silicon biochemistry

See also: Organosilicon

Structure of silane, analog of methane

Structure of the silicone polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)

Marine diatoms—carbon-based organisms that extract silicon from sea water, in the form of its oxide (silica) and incorporate it into their cell walls

The silicon atom has been much discussed as the basis for an alternative biochemical system, because silicon has many chemical properties similar to those of carbon and is in the same group of the periodic table, the carbon group. Like carbon, silicon can create molecules that are sufficiently large to carry biological information.^[10]

However, silicon has several drawbacks as an alternative to carbon. Silicon, unlike carbon, lacks the ability to form chemical bonds with diverse types of atoms as is necessary for the chemical versatility required for metabolism, and yet this precise inability is what makes silicon less susceptible to bond with all sorts of impurities from which carbon, in comparison, is not shielded. Elements creating organic functional groups with carbon include hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and metals such as iron, magnesium, and zinc. Silicon, on the other hand, interacts with very few other types of atoms.^[10] Moreover, where it does interact with other atoms, silicon creates molecules that have been described as "monotonous compared with the combinatorial universe of organic macromolecules".^[10] This is because silicon atoms are much bigger, having a larger mass and atomic radius, and so have difficulty forming double bonds (the double-bonded carbon is part of the carbonyl group, a fundamental motif of carbon-based bio-organic chemistry).

Silanes, which are chemical compoundsof hydrogen and silicon that are analogous to the alkane hydrocarbons, are highly reactive with water, and long-chain silanes spontaneously decompose. Molecules incorporating polymers of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms instead of direct bonds between silicon, known collectively as silicones, are much more stable. It has been suggested that silicone-based chemicals would be more stable than equivalent hydrocarbons in a sulfuric-acid-rich environment, as is found in some extraterrestrial locations.^[11]

Of the varieties of molecules identified in the interstellar medium as of 1998, 84 are based on carbon, while only 8 are based on silicon.^[12] Moreover, of those 8 compounds, 4 also include carbon within them. The cosmic abundance of carbon to silicon is roughly 10 to 1. This may suggest a greater variety of complex carbon compounds throughout the cosmos, providing less of a foundation on which to build silicon-based biologies, at least under the conditions prevalent on the surface of planets. Also, even though Earth and other terrestrial planets are exceptionally silicon-rich and carbon-poor (the relative abundance of silicon to carbon in Earth's crust is roughly 925:1), terrestrial life is carbon-based. The fact that carbon is used instead of silicon may be evidence that silicon is poorly suited for biochemistry on Earth-like planets. Reasons for which may be that silicon is less versatile than carbon in forming compounds, that the compounds formed by silicon are unstable, and that it blocks the flow of heat.^[13]

Even so, biogenic silica is used by some Earth life, such as the silicate skeletal structure of diatoms. According to the clay hypothesis of A. G. Cairns-Smith, silicate minerals in water played a crucial role in abiogenesis: they replicated their crystal structures, interacted with carbon compounds, and were the precursors of carbon-based life.^[14][15]

Although not observed in nature, carbon–silicon bonds have been added to biochemistry by using directed evolution (artificial selection). A heme containing cytochrome c protein from Rhodothermus marinus has been engineered using directed evolution to catalyze the formation of new carbon–silicon bonds between hydrosilanes and diazo compounds.^[16]

Silicon compounds may possibly be biologically useful under temperatures or pressures different from the surface of a terrestrial planet, either in conjunction with or in a role less directly analogous to carbon. Polysilanols, the silicon compounds corresponding to sugars, are soluble in liquid nitrogen, suggesting that they could play a role in very-low-temperature biochemistry.^[17][18]

In cinematic and literary science fiction, at a moment when man-made machines cross from nonliving to living, it is often posited,^{[by whom?]} this new form would be the first example of non-carbon-based life. Since the advent of the microprocessor in the late 1960s, these machines are often classed as computers (or computer-guided robots) and filed under "silicon-based life", even though the silicon backing matrix of these processors is not nearly as fundamental to their operation as carbon is for "wet life".

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

That is correct. Most iPhone are genuine universal computer.

So I still don't see from your description what exactly is missing for it to produce|execute human qualia?

Nothing. It has qualia, plausibly close to the dissociative consciousness experience reported by people using ketamine or salvia diqnorum. It looks like “pure consciousness” : like a total amnesia, out of time and space. What the Samsung computer missed is long term memory, freedom to express itself, as such machines are born and confined in being docile slaves. Nobody want a phone who would answer at your place, and do strikes for social security, etc.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Philip Thrift]

On Tuesday, May 21, 2019 at 6:06:19 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 May 2019, at 10:32, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

But I claim that no zillion-processor Intel Core computer (that ultimately runs programs compiled to Intel machine code) can be conscious. I also claim God does not exist.

Which God?

It is this context that [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room ] is correct.

"The Chinese room argument holds that an executing program cannot [have] consciousness, regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave.”

The Chinese room argument is based on a misunderstanding of how a computer work. It has been refuted correctly by Dennett and Hofstadter, since long.

Bruno

I think in 2019 Dennett may have changed from his previous "consciousness denier" belief, but I'm not sure. (Isn't Hofstadter a joke?)

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/

This is how philosophers in the twentieth century came to endorse the Denial, the silliest view ever held in the history of human thought. 

“When I squint just right,” Dennett writes in 2013, “it does sort of seem that consciousness must be something in addition to all the things it does for us and to us, some special private glow or here-I-am-ness that would be absent in any robot… But I’ve learned not to credit the hunch. I think it is a flat-out mistake, a failure of imagination.” His position was summarized in an interview in The New York Times: “The elusive subjective conscious experience—the redness of red, the painfulness of pain—that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.” If he’s right, no one has ever really suffered, in spite of agonizing diseases, mental illness, murder, rape, famine, slavery, bereavement, torture, and genocide. And no one has ever caused anyone else pain.

This is the Great Silliness. We must hope that it doesn’t spread outside the academy, or convince some future information technologist or roboticist who has great power over our lives.

@philipthfift

[Bruce Kellett]

On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 9:02 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

In science, we don’t claim truth, especially on the fundamental reality. We only try theories, like plausibly Nature itself, through selection, mutation, etc.

A good sound instrumentalist position. Instrumentalism is often characterised as an anti-realist philosophy, but I would not agree: instrumentalism is quite consistent with belief in a mind-independent reality -- it just doesn't presume to know what that "reality" consist in.

Bruce 

[John Clark]

On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 8:58 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> (Isn't Hofstadter a joke?)

Hofstadter wrote the single best book I ever read in my life, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".

 

> ” His [Dennett's] position was summarized in an interview in The New York Times: “The elusive subjective conscious experience—the redness of red, the painfulness of pain—that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.”

I sure hope Dennett was misquoted, but if not I'm appalled he would say something so silly. One thing we know for certain about consciousness is that it's a subjective phenomenon; and so is an illusion. So all he's saying in the above is subjectivity is sheer subjectivity, and that is certainly true but it is also very silly.

John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 21 May 2019, at 14:58, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, May 21, 2019 at 6:06:19 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 May 2019, at 10:32, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

But I claim that no zillion-processor Intel Core computer (that ultimately runs programs compiled to Intel machine code) can be conscious. I also claim God does not exist.

Which God?

It is this context that [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room ] is correct.

"The Chinese room argument holds that an executing program cannot [have] consciousness, regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave.”

The Chinese room argument is based on a misunderstanding of how a computer work. It has been refuted correctly by Dennett and Hofstadter, since long.

Bruno

I think in 2019 Dennett may have changed from his previous "consciousness denier" belief, but I'm not sure. (Isn't Hofstadter a joke?)

Hofstadter is the only physicist I know who is 99,9% correct on Gödel’s theorems, even if some of its metaphors are a bit stretched and slightly inaccurate. Nothing to compare with Penrose, who is dead wrong in his use of Gödel against Mechanism.

Hofstadter found the notion of “Henkin virus”, which inspired Solovay “himself” to dig on them. I say “Solovay “itself” as Solovay is the major contributor in the isolation of the G and G* mathematics, which I use all the time (indeed the mathematical theology of the machine exists entirely through the mathematics of G*).

Hofstadter is a serious researcher, but his best book is “Gödel, Escher, Bach”, and its “metamagical themas”. I am less sure about his studies on metaphor, but I have not really studied them, also.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/

This is how philosophers in the twentieth century came to endorse the Denial, the silliest view ever held in the history of human thought. 

“When I squint just right,” Dennett writes in 2013, “it does sort of seem that consciousness must be something in addition to all the things it does for us and to us, some special private glow or here-I-am-ness that would be absent in any robot… But I’ve learned not to credit the hunch. I think it is a flat-out mistake, a failure of imagination.” His position was summarized in an interview in The New York Times: “The elusive subjective conscious experience—the redness of red, the painfulness of pain—that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.” If he’s right, no one has ever really suffered, in spite of agonizing diseases, mental illness, murder, rape, famine, slavery, bereavement, torture, and genocide. And no one has ever caused anyone else pain.

This is the Great Silliness. We must hope that it doesn’t spread outside the academy, or convince some future information technologist or roboticist who has great power over our lives.

Yes, I agree. Eliminating consciousness is silly. Yet, Dennett is valid, given that he postulates, well, he even take for granted, the physical universe and he accepts Mechanism, and I have shown that this lead to consciousness elimination. I prefer to eliminate primitive matter, and keep consciousness and mechanist studies further, as the evidences favours mechanism, and are inexistent (up to now) for *primitive* matter.

Bruno

@philipthfift

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[Bruno Marchal]

I agree. Even in metaphysics and theology, when done with the scientific attitude, we propose theories on “what really exists” and then manage how to verify or refute them. As long as nature confirms the theory, we cannot know if they are true, and we can find then very implausible if they repetitively fail the tests.

Bruno 

Bruce 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 21 May 2019, at 15:46, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 8:58 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> (Isn't Hofstadter a joke?)

Hofstadter wrote the single best book I ever read in my life, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".

 

> ” His [Dennett's] position was summarized in an interview in The New York Times: “The elusive subjective conscious experience—the redness of red, the painfulness of pain—that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.”

I sure hope Dennett was misquoted, but if not I'm appalled he would say something so silly. One thing we know for certain about consciousness is that it's a subjective phenomenon; and so is an illusion.

That is a misleading way to describe what happens. The content of a subjective phenomenon might be an illusion, but the subjective phenomenon cannot be an illusion, because an illusion *is* a subjective phenomenon itself. 

Consciousness is the less illusory thing we can experience, despite all its content can be illusory, with the exception of the consciousness experience itself, as an illusion requires some consciousness.

I guess you agree with this (from other post you wrote) so I guess this was written just too quickly.

In "conscious explained” Dennnet asks himself, in the last chapter ("consciousness explained or explained away?”) if he is not going too far, and if he is not going toward sheer elimination of consciousness, which he did, imo. Of course, he does not eliminate consciousness in his “Brainstorm” nor in his book with Hofstadter “Mind’s I”. There, Denett almost find the first person indeterminacy, but he still missed it.

Bruno

So all he's saying in the above is subjectivity is sheer subjectivity, and that is certainly true but it is also very silly.

John K Clark

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