How to live forever

[John Clark]

​

Woody Allen said "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment”, well maybe there is a way. Yesterday the Large Mammal Brain Preservation Prize was awarded to 21st Century Medicine and lead company ​researcher Robert McIntyre. They used both glutaraldehyde fixation and cryogenic storage, and proved that a pig's brain connectome, that is ​the 150 trillion synaptic connections that are thought to encode memory and the whole mind, is preserved. And because it is stored at near liquid nitrogen temperatures it could be preserved for centuries. 3D pictures were made by a electron microscope after the brain was rewarmed and they showed amazing preservation, and there is no reason to think molecular-level information wouldn't be preserved too. It's even more impressive when you consider that the pictures were made after rewarming because most of the damage happens at that stage, I would have been delighted even if the pictures were made while the brain was still frozen, but this is even better. Kenneth Hayworth  a PhD in Neurosciencesaid:

"Let that sink in…  Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, if properly applied TODAY, could preserve the information content of a human brain for indefinitely-long storage."

At this point there is little doubt, Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation works and it does a much better job than the method Alcor currently uses. And at this point no new science is required we just need improved technical procedures to make it practical to use in a hospital setting and the will to do so.

There is more about this here

https://turingchurch.net/cryonics-for-uploaders-the-brain-preservation-prize-has-been-won-cebbe98c241a

And there is a really good video about this, it's 24 minutes long but anyone who is seriously interested in immortality needs to watch it:  

​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejIKy5R4uGM

John K Clark

[smitra]

Uploading may only become feasible when society has already transitioned
to a machine society, there may then be only a limited interest in
uploading the brain contents of deceased persons who by that time will
be regarded to be not so intelligent. Or they may only do that to
extract what they find interesting, instead of running the full person.
Or perhaps they'll run large groups of people in a virtual setting to
study the natural social behavior, so you may well find yourself in some
Ice Age society hunting mammoths.

Saibal

On 13-03-2018 22:16, John Clark wrote:
> ​
>
> Woody Allen said "_I don't want to achieve immortality through my

> work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to
> live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my

> apartment_”, well maybe there is a way. Yesterday the Large Mammal

> Brain Preservation Prize was awarded to 21st Century Medicine and lead
> company ​researcher Robert McIntyre. They used both glutaraldehyde
> fixation and cryogenic storage, and proved that a pig's brain
> connectome, that is ​the 150 trillion synaptic connections that are
> thought to encode memory and the whole mind, is preserved. And because
> it is stored at near liquid nitrogen temperatures it could be
> preserved for centuries. 3D pictures were made by a electron
> microscope after the brain was rewarmed and they showed amazing
> preservation, and there is no reason to think molecular-level
> information wouldn't be preserved too. It's even more impressive when
> you consider that the pictures were made after rewarming because most
> of the damage happens at that stage, I would have been delighted even
> if the pictures were made while the brain was still frozen, but this
> is even better. Kenneth Hayworth a PhD in Neurosciencesaid:
>
> "Let that sink in… Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, if
> properly applied TODAY, could preserve the information content of a
> human brain for indefinitely-long storage."
>
> At this point there is little doubt, Aldehyde-stabilized
> cryopreservation works and it does a much better job than the method
> Alcor currently uses. And at this point no new science is required we
> just need improved technical procedures to make it practical to use in
> a hospital setting and the will to do so.
>
> There is more about this here
>
> https://turingchurch.net/cryonics-for-uploaders-the-brain-preservation-prize-has-been-won-cebbe98c241a

> [1]
>
> And there is a REALLY good video about this, it's 24 minutes long but

> anyone who is seriously interested in immortality needs to watch it:
>
> ​
>

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejIKy5R4uGM [2]
>
> John K Clark
>
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> Links:
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> [1]
> https://turingchurch.net/cryonics-for-uploaders-the-brain-preservation-prize-has-been-won-cebbe98c241a
> [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejIKy5R4uGM
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[Brent Meeker]

On 3/13/2018 2:48 PM, smitra wrote:
> Uploading may only become feasible when society has already
> transitioned to a machine society, there may then be only a limited
> interest in uploading the brain contents of deceased persons who by
> that time will be regarded to be not so intelligent. Or they may only
> do that to extract what they find interesting, instead of running the
> full person.  Or perhaps they'll run large groups of people in a
> virtual setting to study the natural social behavior, so you may well
> find yourself in some Ice Age society hunting mammoths.

That would more fun than being used in place of an AI to drive a cab.

Brent

[Lawrence Crowell]

Nope, no thanks. The problem is that I suspect that even if you download information from a brain into a AI system that while it might outwardly appear to be the person inside the machine, the person in fact no long exists. At least I suspect this might be, and even if you interact with people in machines and they swear up and down that they exist they are simply emulating what they would ordinarily do. There is a big Pinocchio problem here.

If I were to have my brain preserved this way I would opt to have it transplanted into a body or a clone of my body or some such thing. I think the prospects of actually existing after this are much higher.

Besides, eternity might not be all it is cracked up to be

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/213

LC

[spudb...@aol.com]

Soon the rich will be rushing to Alcor!

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 9:18 PM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

​> ​

Nope, no thanks. The problem is that I suspect that even if you download information from a brain into a AI system that while it might outwardly appear to be the person inside the machine, the person in fact no long exists. At least I suspect this might be, and even if you interact with people in machines and they swear up and down that they exist they are simply emulating what they would ordinarily do.

 Well then, can you give me a good reason for me to believe that Lawrence Crowell actually exists? I don't want to hear you swear up and down that you do exist, I want you to prove it.

 

​> ​

There is a big Pinocchio problem here.

​ 

If I were to have my brain preserved this way I would opt to have it transplanted into a body or a clone of my body or some such thing.

So I take it you believe in the magical carbon theory, the idea that particular element has mystical properties that the element silicon lacks even though the scientific method can not see nothing of the sort.  I think that theory is not only wrong it is lethal to those who adhere to it.  

​

John K Clark​

 

 

[Lawrence Crowell]

It is not about believing anything. Our brains operate not just as switching systems of neurons, but neurons are themselves biological. The real computer analogue I think extends down to the molecular level, where kinase and other actions are similar to computer chip logic. I think it is a very extreme proposition to advance the idea that emulating a brain on silicon or similar solid state physics systems will conserve consciousness.I can very well imagine this could emulate the brain activity of a person, but I think it is a bit much to voluntarily agree to death so your brain can be uploaded in a machine. I suspect consciousness involves some sort of uncomputable Godel type of number. Without that it could be that any such simulation is just dead processing.  

I can see some plausible prospect of removing a brain or CNS from a body and putting that in another body. This will not happen successfully any day soon, though there is some Russian who might go through this soon. I could see some prospect of having brains kept in some low level stasis until a transplant body, whether from a person who experience brain death or maybe a body clone of the person, is available. Even there I suspect the experience might be terribly disorienting, as bodies have a sort of "body brain," which involve a dog's brain worth of neurons, and one would not just have a new body so much as you would neurologically negotiate with the new body for a while.

I am to a certain extent skeptical of some of these extreme futurist projections. I am not sure many of these things will happen. 

LC

[John Clark]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 9:33 AM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> So I take it you believe in the magical carbon theory, the idea that particular element has mystical properties that the element silicon lacks even though the scientific method can not see nothing of the sort.  I think that theory is not only wrong it is lethal to those who adhere to it.   

 

> It is not about believing anything.

Our beliefs determine our actions. For example: I believe my chances of surviving after my brain has been cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures is less than 100% and greater than 0%, but my chances of surviving after my brain has been burned up in a crematorium or eaten by worms is precisely 0%, so I signed up. You have not signed up so you must believe something different.

> Our brains operate not just as switching systems of neurons, but neurons are themselves biological.

Most of what neurons do has nothing to do with thinking or consciousness or any sort of information processing but just involves the dull basic metabolism needed to keep operating, the exact same thing that skin cells do, and kidney cells, and large intestine cells.

> The real computer analogue I think extends down to the molecular level,

Maybe, although there is little evidence for that. Even if true I don’t see how that’s a show stopper, a combination of glutaraldehyde fixation and cryogenic storage should keep most molecular level information intact too, or at least keep it from being scrambled so chaotically that even a Jupiter Brain couldn’t unscramble it.

> I think it is a very extreme proposition to advance the idea that emulating a brain on silicon or similar solid state physics systems will conserve consciousness.

I think it is a far far more extreme proposition to advance the opposite idea because the immediate implication would be that Charles Darwin was dead wrong. However important consciousness is to me to Evolution its irrelevant because Natural Selection can’t directly detect consciousness any better than I can directly detect consciousness in other people, but both I and Natural Selection CAN detect intelligent behavior. So consciousness must be a byproduct of intelligence. That’s why I get so impatient with consciousness theories that just ignore intelligence. After saying consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed intelligently there is nothing more to be said about consciousness.

I suppose it could be argued that maybe Evolution just got lucky and came up with a sort of consciousness circuit by accident, but such a part would not be stable. Consciousness by itself confers no adaptive advantage, only intelligent behavior does, so even if consciousness emerged by pure chance millions of years ago today it would be long gone due to genetic drift, just as the eyes of creatures that have lived for thousands of generations in dark caves have disappeared. And yet here I am, and although I can’t prove it to you I know for a fact that I am conscious. So if the “consciousness circuit” does nothing but generate consciousness it would be gone by now, but if it changed behavior too then the Turing Test also works for consciousness and not just intelligence. Finally a critic could say that maybe Evolution  came up with consciousness because it was  the simplest path (but not the only path)  to intelligence, but if so then we will also  find  it easier to make a intelligent conscious computer  than  a intelligent non-conscious computer.

> I can very well imagine this could emulate the brain activity of a person, but I think it is a bit much to voluntarily agree to death so your brain can be uploaded in a machine.

I agree, I wouldn’t want to be the first, I’d rather wait until they worked out the bugs in the process; unless of course I was already on my deathbed and the only alternative was to be eaten by worms.

> I suspect consciousness involves some sort of uncomputable Godel type of number.

If so then its very very odd that nobody has even found a natural phenomenon that can solve a NP-hard problem in polynomial time, much less found a natural process that can solve uncomputable problems. Quantum Computer expert  Scott Aaronson found a simple demonstration of this fact:

"taking two glass plates with pegs between them, and dipping the resulting contraption into a tub of soapy water. The idea is that the soap bubbles that form between the pegs should trace out the minimum Steiner tree — that is, the minimum total length of line segments connecting the pegs, where the segments can meet at points other than the pegs themselves. Now, this is known to be an NP-hard optimization problem. So, it looks like Nature is solving NP-hard problems in polynomial time!

Long story short, I went to the hardware store, bought some glass plates, liquid soap, etc., and found that, while Nature does often find a minimum Steiner tree with 4 or 5 pegs, it tends to get stuck at local optima with larger numbers of pegs. Indeed, often the soap bubbles settle down to a configuration which is not even a tree (i.e. contains “cycles of soap”), and thus provably can’t be optimal.

The situation is similar for protein folding. Again, people have said that Nature seems to be solving an NP-hard optimization problem in every cell of your body, by letting the proteins fold into their minimum-energy configurations. But there are two problems with this claim. The first problem is that proteins, just like soap bubbles, sometimes get stuck in suboptimal configurations — indeed, it’s believed that’s exactly what happens with Mad Cow Disease. The second problem is that, to the extent that proteins do usually fold into their optimal configurations, there’s an obvious reason why they would: natural selection! If there were a protein that could only be folded by proving the Riemann Hypothesis, the gene that coded for it would quickly get weeded out of the gene pool." 

By the way I highly recommend Aaronson's book "Quantum Computing since Democritus".

> I can see some plausible prospect of removing a brain or CNS from a body and putting that in another body.

Or connecting your brain to a virtual body, in fact that could have already happened to you for all you know. And if you’re not already a brain in a vat you’re certainly a brain in a box made of bone.

> Even there I suspect the experience might be terribly disorienting, as bodies have a sort of "body brain," which involve a dog's brain worth of neurons, and one would not just have a new body so much as you would neurologically negotiate with the new body for a while.

So did Stephen Hawking die today or did he die in 1973 when he started to lose control of his body? I am not a world class athlete so if I woke up and found that had changed and now my body had the strength of a sumo wrestler the endurance of a marathon runner and the muscular coordination of a gold medal gymnast I wouldn’t be very upset.   

> I am not sure many of these things will happen. 

Do you need to be certain of the outcome before you take any action? Suppose you were on a sinking ship in a hurricane and the radio is out so no SOS has been sent and you’re very far from the nearest land. There is a lifeboat but it's small and the waves are mountainous and the ocean is huge. So, would you get into the lifeboat? As for me I agree with Dylan Thomas and would rather not go gentle into that good night and would prefer to rage against the dying of the light.

 John K Clark

 

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/14/2018 6:33 AM, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

It is not about believing anything. Our brains operate not just as switching systems of neurons, but neurons are themselves biological. The real computer analogue I think extends down to the molecular level, where kinase and other actions are similar to computer chip logic.

I think it is a very extreme proposition to advance the idea that emulating a brain on silicon or similar solid state physics systems will conserve consciousness.

But we're pretty sure we can implement intelligence on silicon; even super-human intelligence.  So then the implication is that there can be a being that we can interact with who seems to have human level intelligence and emotion but who is a zombie (i.e. has no inner consciousness).  That then calls into question whether other humans have and inner consciousness.

I can very well imagine this could emulate the brain activity of a person, but I think it is a bit much to voluntarily agree to death so your brain can be uploaded in a machine. I suspect consciousness involves some sort of uncomputable Godel type of number.

What would allow it to be computed by the brain?  Do you think the brain could not be emulated down to, or even below the molecular level?

Brent

[agrays...@gmail.com]

Since we really have no clue about what consciousness is, except that it can likely be simulated to such precision as to never pass a Turing Test (to distinguish artificial from natural intelligence), any attempt at implementing any of the proposals conjectured in this thread should be called THE FRANKENSTEIN PROJECT. AG 

[Lawrence Crowell]

The Aaronson discussion about soap bubbles and optimization is in line with something I have maintained. Eternal black holes with the inner horizon r_- continuous with I^+ means in principle a Turing machine approaching r_- could receive an infinite stream of bits or qubits so it could make a catalog of all Turing machines that halt and do not halt. Quantum mechanics enters into the physics, such as Hawking radiation, that separates  r_- from I^+. However, this may adjust the Chaitan halting probability. With NP-complete problems this would translate into the existence of systems that approximate such solutions.

I suspect the individual consciousness of a person or even animals is wrapped up in some sort of code, that while it might be derived in some approximate way it is tough to find from outside. The thesis that all of consciousness is a manifestation of calculation presumes the brain is primarily involved with computation. The problem is that the brain computes little in the way of mathematical solutions, but rather is involved with maintenance of homeostasis of an organism. Further, consciousness is less about solving problems than it is about maintaining a self-referenced narrative that is a positive feedback and forms a meaning cycle. 

I am not going to sign up for having my brain states downloaded any time soon. You pretty much have to die for this to take place. I am not sure how the brain is preserved this way in the few minutes before redox reactions begin to demolish neurons once blood flow stops. 

I will also prognosticate that the main use of this sort of technology may end up being to support a complete reign of terror. Brain states downloaded into computers could easily be subjected to endless torment, and a reign of terror based on a sort of techno-eschatology might easily be established.

Dylan Thomas went gentle into the gentle night.

LC

On Wednesday, March 14, 2018 at 11:26:21 AM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

[John Clark]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 7:36 AM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Eternal black holes with the inner horizon r_- continuous with I^+ means in principle a Turing machine approaching r_- could receive an infinite stream of bits or qubits so it could make a catalog of all Turing machines that halt and do not halt.

Black holes are not eternal , the lifetime of a Black Hole in seconds can be found with the formula 10,240*PI^2 *(G^2*M^3)/(h*c^4) where G is the Gravitational constant, h is Planck's constant, c is the speed of light and M is the mass of the black Hole in kilograms. And Bekenstein's bound says

​ ​

Black Holes can't deal with infinite information, the number of bits they can deal with is 4 times the area of the event horizon in Planck Areas (1.6* 10^-69 square meters). The formula for the maximum number of bits that can be contained in a sphere of radius R is  PI *R^2 *c/G*h*ln2 . So the maximum information that can be contained in any sphere is proportional to the square of the radius (the area) not the cube of the radius (volume) as you might expect. 

And if you really did somehow have such a complete list then you could use it to construct a device  that could tell you if any Turing Machine will halt or not, it would input any Turing Machine and it would only have 2 possible outputs, YES it will halt or NO it will not halt. Now I can make a device of my own, it would consist of two parts, the first part would be IDENTICAL to your machine, the second half would take the output from your device and if it says YES it will halt then my device will go into a infinite loop and never halt, and if it says NO it will not stop then my device stops immediately.  Now I feed my entire device into itself and then ask your device if my device will ever stop. If you device says YES it will stop then it will not stop and if it says NO it will not stop then it will stop. Therefore your claim to have a list of all Turing Machines that will stop and all Turing Machines  that will not stop must be untrue.

 > Quantum mechanics enters into the physics, such as Hawking radiation, that separates  r_- from I^+. However, this may adjust the Chaitan halting probability. With NP-complete problems this would translate into the existence of systems that approximate such solutions. [...] I suspect the individual consciousness of a person or even animals is wrapped up in some sort of code, that while it might be derived in some approximate way it is tough to find from outside.

Scott Aaronson has this to say about the relationship between consciousness and uncomputable problems:

"I don’t see any compelling reason, at present, to admit the existence of any physical process that can solve uncomputable problems.  And for me, it’s not just a matter of a dearth of evidence that our brains can efficiently solve, say, NP-hard problems, let alone uncomputable ones—or of the exotic physics that would presumably be required for such abilities.  It’s that, even if I supposed we could solve uncomputable problems, I’ve never understood how that’s meant to enlighten us regarding consciousness.  I mean, an oracle for the halting problem seems just as “robotic” and “unconscious” as a Turing machine.  Does consciousness really become less mysterious if we outfit the brain with what amounts to a big hardware upgrade?

​"​

Aaronson has more very interesting stuff to say about this at:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756

 

> The thesis that all of consciousness is a manifestation of calculation presumes the brain is primarily involved with computation. The problem is that the brain computes little in the way of mathematical solutions

You can call it mathematical solutions or something else but it doesn't change the fact that the brain changes from one state to another state with the passage of time, and so does a Turing Machine. And given information about the present state of a brain a Turing Machine could figure out what a future state would be.

> I am not going to sign up for having my brain states downloaded any time soon. You pretty much have to die for this to take place. 

Obviously, if you never die then the entire procedure would be unnecessary.  

> I am not sure how the brain is preserved this way in the few minutes before redox reactions begin to demolish neurons once blood flow stops. 

You use cold. There are cases where people have been trapped under ice covered lakes in near freezing water for over a hour and been revived with no brain damage, in one case a woman’s body temperature went all the way down to 56.7 °F and

​she ​

lived.

> I will also prognosticate that the main use of this sort of technology may end up being to support a complete reign of terror. Brain states downloaded into computers could easily be subjected to endless torment, and a reign of terror based on a sort of techno-eschatology might easily be established.

Why? What on earth would be the point of

​a Jupiter Brain doing that​

?

John K Clark

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Thursday, March 15, 2018 at 12:52:42 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 7:36 AM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfieldquaternions...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Eternal black holes with the inner horizon r_- continuous with I^+ means in principle a Turing machine approaching r_- could receive an infinite stream of bits or qubits so it could make a catalog of all Turing machines that halt and do not halt.

Black holes are not eternal , the lifetime of a Black Hole in seconds can be found with the formula 10,240*PI^2 *(G^2*M^3)/(h*c^4) where G is the Gravitational constant, h is Planck's constant, c is the speed of light and M is the mass of the black Hole in kilograms. And Bekenstein's bound says

​ ​

Black Holes can't deal with infinite information, the number of bits they can deal with is 4 times the area of the event horizon in Planck Areas (1.6* 10^-69 square meters). The formula for the maximum number of bits that can be contained in a sphere of radius R is  PI *R^2 *c/G*h*ln2 . So the maximum information that can be contained in any sphere is proportional to the square of the radius (the area) not the cube of the radius (volume) as you might expect. 

What I wrote about the inner horizon not continuous with I^+ is about Hawking radiation.

It would be best if you not refer to the “Jupiter brain,” for honestly that is extreme science fiction and not anything scientific. In fact much of this seems to me to be a case of where “prophets of science” are trying to show that science can offer up in reality all the fantasy promises of religion. This is why I mention uploading minds into a sort of digital hell. It would not be done by any Jupiter brain but by people who have totalitarian agendas.

Aaronson's argument seems to make it far more implausible to actually duplicate a brain. I am not sure, but that sounds like a barrier to really mapping brain states into a machine, for that map might be NP-complete. The soap bubble problem as an optimization is a sort of extremal graph problem, such as the traveling salesman problem. Given that brains with a trillion or so neurons each with 10^5 dendritic connections this might be an intractable graph problem.

What might be coming to humanity soon could be not some panacea technotopia but a sort of implosion.

LC

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2018 at 10:36 pm, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Aaronson discussion about soap bubbles and optimization is in line with something I have maintained. Eternal black holes with the inner horizon r_- continuous with I^+ means in principle a Turing machine approaching r_- could receive an infinite stream of bits or qubits so it could make a catalog of all Turing machines that halt and do not halt. Quantum mechanics enters into the physics, such as Hawking radiation, that separates  r_- from I^+. However, this may adjust the Chaitan halting probability. With NP-complete problems this would translate into the existence of systems that approximate such solutions.

I suspect the individual consciousness of a person or even animals is wrapped up in some sort of code, that while it might be derived in some approximate way it is tough to find from outside. The thesis that all of consciousness is a manifestation of calculation presumes the brain is primarily involved with computation. The problem is that the brain computes little in the way of mathematical solutions, but rather is involved with maintenance of homeostasis of an organism. Further, consciousness is less about solving problems than it is about maintaining a self-referenced narrative that is a positive feedback and forms a meaning cycle. 

The sequence of reasoning is not that the brain does computation, and that therefore consciousness is computation. It is that the brain apparently gives rise to consciousness, and if brain components can be replaced by a computer, then consciousness should be preserved, otherwise the implausible situation would occur where consciousness gradually fades or suddenly disappears during the replacement process despite no change in behaviour. Against this is the possibility that some component of the brain utilises non-computable physics, so the replacement would fail; but there is no evidence for this, and it seems to me the main reason such theories are entertained at all is a disdain for the idea that human beings are just ordinary matter.

I am not going to sign up for having my brain states downloaded any time soon. You pretty much have to die for this to take place. I am not sure how the brain is preserved this way in the few minutes before redox reactions begin to demolish neurons once blood flow stops. 

I will also prognosticate that the main use of this sort of technology may end up being to support a complete reign of terror. Brain states downloaded into computers could easily be subjected to endless torment, and a reign of terror based on a sort of techno-eschatology might easily be established.

Dylan Thomas went gentle into the gentle night.

LC

On Wednesday, March 14, 2018 at 11:26:21 AM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

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Stathis Papaioannou

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Thursday, March 15, 2018 at 8:34:34 PM UTC-6, stathisp wrote:

On Thu, 15 Mar 2018 at 10:36 pm, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Aaronson discussion about soap bubbles and optimization is in line with something I have maintained. Eternal black holes with the inner horizon r_- continuous with I^+ means in principle a Turing machine approaching r_- could receive an infinite stream of bits or qubits so it could make a catalog of all Turing machines that halt and do not halt. Quantum mechanics enters into the physics, such as Hawking radiation, that separates  r_- from I^+. However, this may adjust the Chaitan halting probability. With NP-complete problems this would translate into the existence of systems that approximate such solutions.

I suspect the individual consciousness of a person or even animals is wrapped up in some sort of code, that while it might be derived in some approximate way it is tough to find from outside. The thesis that all of consciousness is a manifestation of calculation presumes the brain is primarily involved with computation. The problem is that the brain computes little in the way of mathematical solutions, but rather is involved with maintenance of homeostasis of an organism. Further, consciousness is less about solving problems than it is about maintaining a self-referenced narrative that is a positive feedback and forms a meaning cycle. 

The sequence of reasoning is not that the brain does computation, and that therefore consciousness is computation. It is that the brain apparently gives rise to consciousness, and if brain components can be replaced by a computer, then consciousness should be preserved, otherwise the implausible situation would occur where consciousness gradually fades or suddenly disappears during the replacement process despite no change in behaviour. Against this is the possibility that some component of the brain utilises non-computable physics, so the replacement would fail; but there is no evidence for this, and it seems to me the main reason such theories are entertained at all is a disdain for the idea that human beings are just ordinary matter.

The point is not that neurological processes can't be modeled using biophysical algorithms. Below is a neural circuit diagram that illustrates a feedback structure. These neurons could be replaced by flip flop systems and other electronic. In that way this system could be modeled. My main point is there is a distinction between the territory and the map. Feynman also made the quip that simulation is like masturbation; it is fine until you start thinking it is the real thing.

LC

 

I am not going to sign up for having my brain states downloaded any time soon. You pretty much have to die for this to take place. I am not sure how the brain is preserved this way in the few minutes before redox reactions begin to demolish neurons once blood flow stops. 

I will also prognosticate that the main use of this sort of technology may end up being to support a complete reign of terror. Brain states downloaded into computers could easily be subjected to endless torment, and a reign of terror based on a sort of techno-eschatology might easily be established.

Dylan Thomas went gentle into the gentle night.

LC

On Wednesday, March 14, 2018 at 11:26:21 AM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/16/2018 4:57 AM, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

The point is not that neurological processes can't be modeled using biophysical algorithms. Below is a neural circuit diagram that illustrates a feedback structure. These neurons could be replaced by flip flop systems and other electronic. In that way this system could be modeled. My main point is there is a distinction between the territory and the map. Feynman also made the quip that simulation is like masturbation; it is fine until you start thinking it is the real thing.

LC

But isn't consciousness different?  A simulation and the real thing must be identical if "the real thing" is information processing.

Brent

[Lawrence Crowell]

I certainly would not bet my life on this. I would not voluntarily terminate my life early with the idea computational brain states can be mapped into a computer. Is consciousness something capture in the Church-Turing thesis? That to me is a very problematic assumption. 

I give it half a chance this will go the way the cyrogenic movement went. In the 1970s there was a big hype about preserving bodies in liquid nitrogen with the idea of reviving them. There were some clients, but the whole thing hit the reef financially and with growing criticisms about the scientific and medical efficacy of this the bodies were eventually buried. There have been follow on programs with this, but I think it has few takers.

In 20 years in my 70s I might prefer to do things, even gaze at sunsets etc, rather than cast another 10 to 20 years of life onto this promise I will "rise again." For all I know this could just end up as a big hustle where there are those who take my money and I and up as worm food anyway.

LC

[Brent Meeker]

If it just doesn't work and you get buried, it's just  some money lost...you didn't have a choice about betting on life vs death.  I'd be more concerned that it would work and you'd be revived in a time when human brains had been far surpassed and were considered only useful for operating equipment in mining or cleaning office spaces.

Brent

LC

[John Clark]

 Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Black holes are not eternal , the lifetime of a Black Hole in seconds can be found with the formula 10,240*PI^2 *(G^2*M^3)/(h*c^4) where G is the Gravitational constant, h is Planck's constant, c is the speed of light and M is the mass of the black Hole in kilograms. And Bekenstein's bound says   Black Holes can't deal with infinite information, the number of bits they can deal with is 4 times the area of the event horizon in Planck Areas (1.6* 10^-69 square meters). The formula for the maximum number of bits that can be contained in a sphere of radius R is  PI *R^2 *c/G*h*ln2 . So the maximum information that can be contained in any sphere is proportional to the square of the radius (the area) not the cube of the radius (volume) as you might expect. 

 

> What I wrote about the inner horizon not continuous with I^+ is about Hawking radiation.

I have no idea what “I^+” means but I assume you’re talking about the Cauchy horizon that is inside the event horizon of a rotating or electrically charged Black Hole. Causality breaks down inside the Cauchy horizon so I don’t see how it could have anything to do with Turing Machines because they need causality. And out present physics may break down in some places but I don’t think logical self contradictions are allowed anywhere and that is what’s you’d have if you had a complete list of all Turing Machines that halt and all that don’t. 

> It would be best if you not refer to the “Jupiter brain,” 

I don’t see why, I think its pretty good shorthand for what I’m talking about.

> for honestly that is extreme science fiction

Well it’s fiction I’ll give you that, such a thing hasn’t been constructed. Yet.

 > and not anything scientific.

Please state why scientific law that would violate. The fastest signals in the human brain move at about 100 meters a second, many are far slower, light moves at 300 million meters per second. So if you insist that the 2 most distant parts of a brain communicate as fast as they do in a human brain (and I'm not entirely sure why that constraint would be necessary) then parts in the brain of a AI could be at least 3 million times as distant. The volume increases by the cube of the distance so such a brain would physically be 27 million trillion times larger than a human brain. Even if 99.9% of that space were used just to deliver power and get rid of waste heat you'd still have a thousand trillion times as much volume for logic and memory components as humans have room for inside their heads. And the components would be much much smaller than the human ones too.

It takes a human being 4 years to learn enough to graduate from Harvard, but a electronic AI would send messages between its brain components 3 million times faster than humans send messages between their brain components, so a AI could graduate from Harvard in 64 minutes. Actually it would take even less time because the AI’s brain components would be far smaller than the human ones.

The human brain is about a foot in diameter, 3 million times that would be about 570 miles; well OK that’s not quite Jupiter size but allow me a little poetic license. Or do you insist on "Asteroid Brain"? 

>  In fact much of this seems to me to be a case of where “prophets of science” are trying to show that science can offer up in reality all the fantasy promises of religion. 

It would be disingenuous of me to insist there is no connection between what I’m talking about and what religion talks about, but that’s because information is as close as you can get to the traditional religious concept of the soul and still remain within the scientific method. Consider the similarities: The soul is non material and so is   information. It's difficult to pin down a unique physical location for the soul, and the same is true for information. The soul is the essential, must have, part of consciousness, exactly the same situation is true for information. The soul is immortal and so, potentially, is information.   

But there are important differences too. A soul is unique but information can be duplicated. The soul is and will always remain unfathomable, but information is understandable, in fact information is the ONLY thing that is understandable. Information unambiguously exists, I don't think anyone would deny that, but if the soul exists it will never be proven scientifically.

> This is why I mention uploading minds into a sort of digital hell. It would not be done by any Jupiter brain but by people who have totalitarian agendas.

You said that before but gave no argument to support it, and you didn’t this time either. I can see how a Jupiter Brain might consider me so unimportant that it wouldn’t bother to revive me, but I don’t see why it would revive me just so it could torture me for eternity as the God of the Bible is always threatening to do.

> Aaronson's argument seems to make it far more implausible to actually duplicate a brain. I am not sure, but that sounds like a barrier to really mapping brain states into a machine, for that map might be NP-complete. 

If its NP-complete then how does nature do it? As I said before no physical process, biological or otherwise, has ever been found that can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, and yet your brain has already been duplicated, the atoms in it are not the same ones that made it up one year ago. Your brain today was made from last years mashed potatoes. If random mutation and natural selection can do it then intelligence can do it too, and unlike Evolution it won’t take 3 billion years to figure out how. 

> The soap bubble problem as an optimization is a sort of extremal graph problem, such as the traveling salesman problem. Given that brains with a trillion or so neurons each with 10^5 dendritic connections this might be an intractable graph problem.

You’re not trying to find a shorter path through 48 cities much less trying to find the shortest path, all you’re trying to do is duplicate a chart showing the path the traveling salesman already took. If I had a square piece of paper that graphed all those trillion neurons it would have a million neurons on a edge, but why on earth would duplicating that paper in a Xerox machine be a intractable problem?

> What might be coming to humanity soon could be not some panacea technotopia but a sort of implosion.

A century from now I doubt there will be any beings that we would recognize being human, but if we’re very very lucky there might be beings that remember being human. And its interesting that you criticize my post for being too science fictioney but you include a photo from some grade B science fiction movie.

  John K Clark

  

[John Clark]

Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The point is not that neurological processes can't be modeled using biophysical algorithms. Below is a neural circuit diagram that illustrates a feedback structure. These neurons could be replaced by flip flop systems and other electronic. In that way this system could be modeled. 

Huh? You just said they can’t be modeled.

> My main point is there is a distinction between the territory and the map. 

So what exactly is that distinction, brains are squishy but computers are not and only squishy things can be conscious? When my calculator adds 2+2 is that the map or the territory, is it doing real arithmetic or simulated arithmetic? Is the “4” my calculator comes up with the same “4” that I find when I do the calculation by hand?

 > Is consciousness something capture in the Church-Turing thesis? 

If it isn’t then Charles Darwin was dead wrong. I don’t think Darwin was wrong. Do you?

> That to me is a very problematic assumption. 

If you don’t subscribe to the Church-Turing thesis then you subscribe to the Heebe-Jeebe thesis

​. ​

t’s a fact that if the physical state of your brain changes your consciousness changes and if your consciousness changes the physical state of your brain changes. So what’s problematic about the Church-Turing thesis?

> I give it half a chance this will go the way the cyrogenic movement went. In the 1970s there was a big hype about preserving bodies in liquid nitrogen with the idea of reviving them. There were some clients, but the whole thing hit the reef financially and with growing criticisms about the scientific and medical efficacy of this the bodies were eventually buried.

Alcor currently has 153 people in cryogenic storage and 1,136 people signed up for it including me, the one who’s been in storage the longest is James Bedford, he was frozen on January 12, 1967 and has remained continuously at a liquid nitrogen temperature to this day. If I die today and Alcor takes as good care of me as it did for Bedford then 51 years might be long enough to get me to where I want to go. By the way, Alcor is not the only Cryonics organization although it is the best in my opinion.

 

​ ​

John K Clark 

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 16 March 2018 at 22:57, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, March 15, 2018 at 8:34:34 PM UTC-6, stathisp wrote:

On Thu, 15 Mar 2018 at 10:36 pm, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Aaronson discussion about soap bubbles and optimization is in line with something I have maintained. Eternal black holes with the inner horizon r_- continuous with I^+ means in principle a Turing machine approaching r_- could receive an infinite stream of bits or qubits so it could make a catalog of all Turing machines that halt and do not halt. Quantum mechanics enters into the physics, such as Hawking radiation, that separates  r_- from I^+. However, this may adjust the Chaitan halting probability. With NP-complete problems this would translate into the existence of systems that approximate such solutions.

I suspect the individual consciousness of a person or even animals is wrapped up in some sort of code, that while it might be derived in some approximate way it is tough to find from outside. The thesis that all of consciousness is a manifestation of calculation presumes the brain is primarily involved with computation. The problem is that the brain computes little in the way of mathematical solutions, but rather is involved with maintenance of homeostasis of an organism. Further, consciousness is less about solving problems than it is about maintaining a self-referenced narrative that is a positive feedback and forms a meaning cycle. 

The sequence of reasoning is not that the brain does computation, and that therefore consciousness is computation. It is that the brain apparently gives rise to consciousness, and if brain components can be replaced by a computer, then consciousness should be preserved, otherwise the implausible situation would occur where consciousness gradually fades or suddenly disappears during the replacement process despite no change in behaviour. Against this is the possibility that some component of the brain utilises non-computable physics, so the replacement would fail; but there is no evidence for this, and it seems to me the main reason such theories are entertained at all is a disdain for the idea that human beings are just ordinary matter.

The point is not that neurological processes can't be modeled using biophysical algorithms. Below is a neural circuit diagram that illustrates a feedback structure. These neurons could be replaced by flip flop systems and other electronic. In that way this system could be modeled. My main point is there is a distinction between the territory and the map. Feynman also made the quip that simulation is like masturbation; it is fine until you start thinking it is the real thing.

LC

You're suggesting that consciousness could be separated from the associated behaviour. That would be very strange. It would mean that you could replace part of a person's brain with an electronic system and the person would behave exactly the same, but their consciousness would be different. If their consciousness is different, they should be able to notice this and communicate it, at least if the difference is large enough. But if the neural replacement is functionally equivalent, they will not be able to communicate it, because their brain will continue sending signals to the muscles responsible for communication as if nothing had changed. So either the subject would be unable to notice a large change in consciousness, or they would notice it but, against their wishes, speech would continue coming out of their mouth indicating that everything was just the same.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/16/2018 5:13 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

Feynman also made the quip that simulation is like masturbation; it is fine until you start thinking it is the real thing.

Actually Feynman's quip was about mathematics as compared to physics.

Brent

[agrays...@gmail.com]

Is there really any plausible argument for the claim that the brain functions like a computer, and that one of its outputs is consciousness?  If consciousness cannot be explained by computation, the result of this immortality project will be to create FRANKENSTEIN'S. AG 

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 2:06:32 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

 Lawrence Crowell <goldenfieldquaternions...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Black holes are not eternal , the lifetime of a Black Hole in seconds can be found with the formula 10,240*PI^2 *(G^2*M^3)/(h*c^4) where G is the Gravitational constant, h is Planck's constant, c is the speed of light and M is the mass of the black Hole in kilograms. And Bekenstein's bound says   Black Holes can't deal with infinite information, the number of bits they can deal with is 4 times the area of the event horizon in Planck Areas (1.6* 10^-69 square meters). The formula for the maximum number of bits that can be contained in a sphere of radius R is  PI *R^2 *c/G*h*ln2 . So the maximum information that can be contained in any sphere is proportional to the square of the radius (the area) not the cube of the radius (volume) as you might expect. 

 

> What I wrote about the inner horizon not continuous with I^+ is about Hawking radiation.

I have no idea what “I^+” means but I assume you’re talking about the Cauchy horizon that is inside the event horizon of a rotating or electrically charged Black Hole. Causality breaks down inside the Cauchy horizon so I don’t see how it could have anything to do with Turing Machines because they need causality. And out present physics may break down in some places but I don’t think logical self contradictions are allowed anywhere and that is what’s you’d have if you had a complete list of all Turing Machines that halt and all that don’t. 

The Penrose diagram for the Kerr-Newman spacetime is

The asymptotic null infinity is continuous with the inner horizon. With Hawking radiation this diagram becomes something more like what is below. 

Hawking radiation has made the r_- and I^+ no longer continuous. This means quantum mechanics prevents spacetimes from becoming Hobarth-Malement spacetimes that can be a universal Turing machine that can determine the halting status of any algorithm.

The point of the NP-complete algorithm and the soap bubble demonstration is that nature does not solve them. Nature provides a "physical hack" that works well enough. This is an approximate solution to what ever the idea solution would be, and often with biology this can involve a high level of redundancy of different genes. Plants and fungis are masters at this with their tendency to polypoid chromosomes. 

I think there is a difference between simulating something and thinking the simulation is the reality. There are massive computer programs to simulate the evolution of galaxy domains, walls and clusters in Λ-CDM. At no point would somebody say there is a real cosmology in the computer. There is a computer brain project in Europe underway, and I don't think many people think this thing is going to start behaving like a real person. The map is not the territory.

Evolution does not say much about consciousness. In fact largely it is about a stochastic randomizing of genes with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and selection mechanisms. There is then an iteracted process of SNPs and selection. The older discredited Lamarkianism actually invoked more in the way of will, teleonomy or consciousness. Biological evolution also effectively breaks down when it comes to the origin of pre-biotic chemistry and early life.

Science fiction is ok up to a point. I will say that on the list of what is more probable, a Jupiter sized computer brain or that we humans blow it utterly, I think the latter is more plausible. In fact this country has a barbarian for a President who just might do the trick. However, in arguing things it is not exactly standard to say "in the future there will be a Jupiter sized brain that solves this." 

LC

 

> It would be best if you not refer to the “Jupiter brain,” 

I don’t see why, I think its pretty good shorthand for what I’m talking about.

> for honestly that is extreme science fiction

Well it’s fiction I’ll give you tat, such a thing hasn’t been constructed. Yet.

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/16/2018 6:07 PM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 8:33:37 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

On 3/16/2018 5:13 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

Feynman also made the quip that simulation is like masturbation; it is fine until you start thinking it is the real thing.

Actually Feynman's quip was about mathematics as compared to physics.

Brent

Is there really any plausible argument for the claim that the brain functions like a computer, and that one of its outputs is consciousness? 

It is more than plausible that one of the outputs of the brain is consciousness.  There are chemical and electrical experiments showing that the consciousness is affected by changes to the brain and vice versa.  Whether the brain functions like a computer depends a lot on what you mean by "like".  So far as we know all physical systems are computable to abritrary accuracy.  So it would be very surprising if something the brain does is uncomputable, except for some randomness via QM.

Brent

If consciousness cannot be explained by computation, the result of this immortality project will be to create FRANKENSTEIN'S. AG 

[Lawrence Crowell]

Q: You're suggesting that consciousness could be separated from the associated behaviour.[sic]

I am not saying this is the case, but that we do not know otherwise. We are already simulating human functions with devices, say Alexis, and people are increasingly interacting with these things as if they are conscious. As time goes on we may find there are machines and robots that are very close of human-like and difficult to separate from human.  Clearly is may be possible to replace small lost brain functions with digital circuitry, and if small enough the machine aspect of things may not be perceived by the patient. As one replaces more however, things might change.

In this territory we really do not know. It does seem though we have a lot of hot conjectures about this though. It also seems a bit of this has sum hubris to it.

LC

[agrays...@gmail.com]

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 9:29:57 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

On 3/16/2018 6:07 PM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 8:33:37 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

On 3/16/2018 5:13 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

Feynman also made the quip that simulation is like masturbation; it is fine until you start thinking it is the real thing.

Actually Feynman's quip was about mathematics as compared to physics.

Brent

Is there really any plausible argument for the claim that the brain functions like a computer, and that one of its outputs is consciousness? 

It is more than plausible that one of the outputs of the brain is consciousness.  There are chemical and electrical experiments showing that the consciousness is affected by changes to the brain and vice versa.  Whether the brain functions like a computer depends a lot on what you mean by "like".  So far as we know all physical systems are computable to abritrary accuracy.  So it would be very surprising if something the brain does is uncomputable, except for some randomness via QM.

Brent

What does it mean that "all physical systems are computable to arbitrary accuracy"? What does "computable" mean in this context?

Another issue worth mentioning is how the macro world was generated from the quantum world. ISTM, that consciousness is an emergent property; a macro property emerging from quantum properties. If we don't understand how the macro world was generated from the quantum world, how can we hope to explain consciousness? Aren't we putting the cart before the horse?

TIA, AG

[agrays...@gmail.com]

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 9:57:38 PM UTC-4, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 9:29:57 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

On 3/16/2018 6:07 PM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 8:33:37 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

On 3/16/2018 5:13 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

Feynman also made the quip that simulation is like masturbation; it is fine until you start thinking it is the real thing.

Actually Feynman's quip was about mathematics as compared to physics.

Brent

Is there really any plausible argument for the claim that the brain functions like a computer, and that one of its outputs is consciousness? 

It is more than plausible that one of the outputs of the brain is consciousness.  There are chemical and electrical experiments showing that the consciousness is affected by changes to the brain and vice versa.  Whether the brain functions like a computer depends a lot on what you mean by "like".  So far as we know all physical systems are computable to abritrary accuracy.  So it would be very surprising if something the brain does is uncomputable, except for some randomness via QM.

Brent

What does it mean that "all physical systems are computable to arbitrary accuracy"? What does "computable" mean in this context?

Another issue worth mentioning is how the macro world was generated from the quantum world. ISTM, that consciousness is an emergent property; a macro property emerging from quantum properties. If we don't understand how the macro world was generated from the quantum world, how can we hope to explain consciousness? Aren't we putting the cart before the horse?

TIA, AG

More specifically, in the wire diagram and functioning of brain cells, aren't they more analog than digital; that is, isn't it inaccurate to model the connections are being strictly ON or OFF (like the bits in a computer), but nothing in between? AG 

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Saturday, March 17, 2018 at 11:08:53 AM UTC-6, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 9:57:38 PM UTC-4, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 9:29:57 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

On 3/16/2018 6:07 PM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 8:33:37 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

On 3/16/2018 5:13 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

Feynman also made the quip that simulation is like masturbation; it is fine until you start thinking it is the real thing.

Actually Feynman's quip was about mathematics as compared to physics.

Brent

Is there really any plausible argument for the claim that the brain functions like a computer, and that one of its outputs is consciousness? 

It is more than plausible that one of the outputs of the brain is consciousness.  There are chemical and electrical experiments showing that the consciousness is affected by changes to the brain and vice versa.  Whether the brain functions like a computer depends a lot on what you mean by "like".  So far as we know all physical systems are computable to abritrary accuracy.  So it would be very surprising if something the brain does is uncomputable, except for some randomness via QM.

Brent

What does it mean that "all physical systems are computable to arbitrary accuracy"? What does "computable" mean in this context?

Another issue worth mentioning is how the macro world was generated from the quantum world. ISTM, that consciousness is an emergent property; a macro property emerging from quantum properties. If we don't understand how the macro world was generated from the quantum world, how can we hope to explain consciousness? Aren't we putting the cart before the horse?

TIA, AG

More specifically, in the wire diagram and functioning of brain cells, aren't they more analog than digital; that is, isn't it inaccurate to model the connections are being strictly ON or OFF (like the bits in a computer), but nothing in between? AG 

As I have argued with Torsten and Phillip the issue of discrete and continuous is slippery. Quantum bits may form an HoTT doscrete type system, but since it it based on homotopy that is built from continuous diffeomorphisms of curves and chains. Similarly with circuits, flip flops are just two op-amps that operate on standard analogue electronics. The switching on and off of a current by the depletion of carriers is an analogue physical process, but this results in a digital processes. The analogue of neurons to electronic circuits is similar, in that the negative feed back on one neuron with action potentials on dendrites from another neuron has some continuous properties to it.

LC

[John Clark]

Lawrence Crowell <goldenfieldquaternions...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hawking radiation has made the r_- and I^+ no longer continuous. This means quantum mechanics prevents spacetimes from becoming Hobarth-Malement spacetimes that can be a universal Turing machine that can determine the halting status of any algorithm.

For that you'd need closed timelike curves and that is probably not physically possible because paradoxes would abound if traveling into the past could be done, the most important one for our discussion would be the one that Turing found if you had a complete list of all computations that would halt and all that would not.  Also, all Malament-Hogarth spacetimes have naked singularities but nobody has ever detected one and most think nobody ever will because they don't exist. But what all this very controversial hyper exotic physics that may or may not exist has to do with the viability of Cryonics I don't quite see, unless you're saying well established quantum physics and relativity can find no fundamental flaw in the idea and so you need to go to the bleeding edge of speculation. The only thing Black Holes and consciousness have in common is both are odd.

> The point of the NP-complete algorithm and the soap bubble demonstration is that nature does not solve them. 

Then the entire NP issue is irrelevant as far as consciousness is concerned because my conscious brain produces consciousness and its natural and physical,  but my  brain can’t solve NP-complete algorithms in polynomial time any better than computer can, in fact I can't even do as well as at is as computers.

> I think there is a difference between simulating something and thinking the simulation is the reality. 

And I think a thing and its simulation are different only if the thing being simulated is a noun, not if the thing being simulated is a verb or a adjective, not if the thing being simulated is thinking. That’s why the 4 my calculator produces when it adds 2+2 is exactly the same as 4 that I produce when I add 2+2. So there would be no difference between you thinking there is a difference between simulating something and thinking the simulation is the reality, and a computer thinking there is a difference between simulating something and thinking the simulation is the reality.

Yes a simulated flame is not identical to a real flame but to say it has absolutely no reality can lead to problems. Suppose you say that for a fire to be real it must have some immaterial essence of fire, a sort of burning soul, thus a simulated flame does not really burn because it just changes the pattern in a computer memory. The trouble is using the same reasoning you could say that a real fire doesn't really burn, it just oxidizes chemicals; but really a flame can't even do that, it just obeys the laws of chemistry.  A simulated flame won't burn your computer but it will burn a simulated object. A real flame won't burn the laws of chemistry but it will burn your finger. 

> There are massive computer programs to simulate the evolution of galaxy domains, walls and clusters in Λ-CDM. At no point would somebody say there is a real cosmology in the computer. 

Today’s computer programs may be massive but they are not yet massive enough to include a intelligence that can observe the workings of the galactic simulation, to that intelligence the simulated galaxy would be the only reality there is.  

> There is a computer brain project in Europe underway, and I don't think many people think this thing is going to start behaving like a real person. 

What are you talking about, computers are already starting to act like real people.

> The map is not the territory.

A Ulam spiral is a map of the prime numbers, that map is the territory. Shakespeare's First Folio is a map of Shakespeare's plays, and that map is also the territory.

> Evolution does not say much about consciousness. 

NONSENSE! Evolution produced me. I know with 100% certainty that I am conscious. I very strongly suspect billions of other things are conscious too. I know for a fact Evolution can detect intelligent behavior but it can’t detect consciousness and yet I am consciousness. Therefor consciousness MUST be a byproduct intelligence. Evolution says as much about consciousness as there is to say, it is the best purely logical argument against solipsism, in fact it is the only one, all the others are just variations of “my initiation says its untrue” or “solipsism is too strange to be true”.     

> In fact largely it is about a stochastic randomizing of genes with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and selection mechanisms. There is then an iteracted process of SNPs and selection.

True, but how is that relevant? 

> Biological evolution also effectively breaks down when it comes to the origin of pre-biotic chemistry and early life.

Darwin couldn’t explain how to get from simple chemicals to bacteria but he could explain how to get from bacteria to human beings, not a bad days work I’d say; and when it comes to intelligence or consciousness that’s the step where the action is.  

> I will say that on the list of what is more probable, a Jupiter sized computer brain or that we humans blow it utterly, I think the latter is more plausible. 

You may be right although I’m sure we both hope you’re not.

>In fact this country has a barbarian for a President who just might do the trick. 

 

Yes,.Captain Bone Spurs is not only dishonest and crazy he’s also stupid. In one way his stupidity is a good thing in that it lessens the probability of him achieving his goal of becoming a dictator, but on the other hand it doesn’t take much intelligence to start a war, even a thermonuclear war. So if Jupiter Brains never get built don't thank Black Holes, thank Donald J Trump.

 John K Clark

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Sat, 17 Mar 2018 at 12:36 pm, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 6:14:22 PM UTC-6, stathisp wrote:

On 16 March 2018 at 22:57, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, March 15, 2018 at 8:34:34 PM UTC-6, stathisp wrote:

On Thu, 15 Mar 2018 at 10:36 pm, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Aaronson discussion about soap bubbles and optimization is in line with something I have maintained. Eternal black holes with the inner horizon r_- continuous with I^+ means in principle a Turing machine approaching r_- could receive an infinite stream of bits or qubits so it could make a catalog of all Turing machines that halt and do not halt. Quantum mechanics enters into the physics, such as Hawking radiation, that separates  r_- from I^+. However, this may adjust the Chaitan halting probability. With NP-complete problems this would translate into the existence of systems that approximate such solutions.

I suspect the individual consciousness of a person or even animals is wrapped up in some sort of code, that while it might be derived in some approximate way it is tough to find from outside. The thesis that all of consciousness is a manifestation of calculation presumes the brain is primarily involved with computation. The problem is that the brain computes little in the way of mathematical solutions, but rather is involved with maintenance of homeostasis of an organism. Further, consciousness is less about solving problems than it is about maintaining a self-referenced narrative that is a positive feedback and forms a meaning cycle. 

The sequence of reasoning is not that the brain does computation, and that therefore consciousness is computation. It is that the brain apparently gives rise to consciousness, and if brain components can be replaced by a computer, then consciousness should be preserved, otherwise the implausible situation would occur where consciousness gradually fades or suddenly disappears during the replacement process despite no change in behaviour. Against this is the possibility that some component of the brain utilises non-computable physics, so the replacement would fail; but there is no evidence for this, and it seems to me the main reason such theories are entertained at all is a disdain for the idea that human beings are just ordinary matter.

The point is not that neurological processes can't be modeled using biophysical algorithms. Below is a neural circuit diagram that illustrates a feedback structure. These neurons could be replaced by flip flop systems and other electronic. In that way this system could be modeled. My main point is there is a distinction between the territory and the map. Feynman also made the quip that simulation is like masturbation; it is fine until you start thinking it is the real thing.

LC

You're suggesting that consciousness could be separated from the associated behaviour. That would be very strange. It would mean that you could replace part of a person's brain with an electronic system and the person would behave exactly the same, but their consciousness would be different. If their consciousness is different, they should be able to notice this and communicate it, at least if the difference is large enough. But if the neural replacement is functionally equivalent, they will not be able to communicate it, because their brain will continue sending signals to the muscles responsible for communication as if nothing had changed. So either the subject would be unable to notice a large change in consciousness, or they would notice it but, against their wishes, speech would continue coming out of their mouth indicating that everything was just the same.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

Q: You're suggesting that consciousness could be separated from the associated behaviour.[sic]

I am not saying this is the case, but that we do not know otherwise.

I suggest that we *do* know otherwise, if we assume that consciousness is due to the physical brain and the behaviour of the brain can be simulated by a digital computer. If not, it would lead to absurdity, as per my original post.

We are already simulating human functions with devices, say Alexis, and people are increasingly interacting with these things as if they are conscious. As time goes on we may find there are machines and robots that are very close of human-like and difficult to separate from human.  Clearly is may be possible to replace small lost brain functions with digital circuitry, and if small enough the machine aspect of things may not be perceived by the patient. As one replaces more however, things might change.

In this territory we really do not know. It does seem though we have a lot of hot conjectures about this though. It also seems a bit of this has sum hubris to it.

You failed to address the question of what exactly would happen if (non-hubristically?) the digital circuitry duplicated the observable behaviour of the neurones but not any associated consciousness.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/17/2018 4:08 PM, John Clark wrote:

NONSENSE! Evolution produced me. I know with 100% certainty that I am conscious. I very strongly suspect billions of other things are conscious too. I know for a fact Evolution can detect intelligent behavior but it can’t detect consciousness and yet I am consciousness. Therefor consciousness MUST be a byproduct intelligence.

The evolutionary argument is a good one for brains like humans and other animals.  But it may be that consciousness is only entailed by intelligence that is realized by neural nets with limited memory or some other constraints that are accidents of the evolution of intelligence on Earth.  Intelligence realized in some other way might not be conscious, or might be conscious in different way that we couldn't recognize as such.

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

Good point.

Then, it is enough to understand the fact that all computations existence, with a universal redundancy, can be be proven once we assume the existence or the truth of any universal machinery, in the sense of Turing/Church. 

People confuse the evidences for a physical reality with some evidence for a primary physical reality (Aristotle big theological mistake). They conclude that the 3p (or 1p plural) clinical death is the end of the first person experience by using an identity link which is invalid if we assume digital mechanism.

With mechanism there are mainly two sort of immortality: one coming from remembering our universal nature (Nirvana), the other by our infinitely many continuations in the web of all computations in arithmetic.

Technological immortality does not make much sense, but longer and longer live makes sense, as some people get attached to the “terrestrial” illusions, and … why not. Just try to avoid hell.

Bruno

Brent

[John Clark]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 12:04 AM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> The evolutionary argument is a good one for brains like humans and other animals.  But it may be that consciousness is only entailed by intelligence that is realized by neural nets with limited memory or some other constraints that are accidents of the evolution of intelligence on Earth.

So limited memory is a requirement for consciousness and other constraints may be needed too, so there is a inverse relationship, the smarter you are the less conscious you become. Well maybe, I can't prove the idea is wrong with mathematical rigor but if its true then its odd that when I get very sleepy I become less conscious and if you were observing me at the time you'd say my IQ was about 50 points lower than it was when I was not sleepy.

> Intelligence realized in some other way might not be conscious

You can play the maybe game for eternity. Maybe my fellow human beings are intelligent in some other way than I am intelligent and are therefore not conscious. Actually in this case there is no maybe about it, you ARE intelligent in some way different from me, otherwise you'd be me and I'd be you.

> or might be conscious in different way that we couldn't recognize as such.

Maybe. We don't recognize trees and rocks and human cadavers as being conscious because they don't behave intelligently, but maybe they are. Maybe, but I doubt it.

  John K Clark

 

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Saturday, March 17, 2018 at 5:08:35 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

Lawrence Crowell <goldenfieldquaternions...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hawking radiation has made the r_- and I^+ no longer continuous. This means quantum mechanics prevents spacetimes from becoming Hobarth-Malement spacetimes that can be a universal Turing machine that can determine the halting status of any algorithm.

For that you'd need closed timelike curves and that is probably not physically possible because paradoxes would abound if traveling into the past could be done, the most important one for our discussion would be the one that Turing found if you had a complete list of all computations that would halt and all that would not.  Also, all Malament-Hogarth spacetimes have naked singularities but nobody has ever detected one and most think nobody ever will because they don't exist. But what all this very controversial hyper exotic physics that may or may not exist has to do with the viability of Cryonics I don't quite see, unless you're saying well established quantum physics and relativity can find no fundamental flaw in the idea and so you need to go to the bleeding edge of speculation. The only thing Black Holes and consciousness have in common is both are odd.

The MH spacetimes have Cauchy horizons that because they pile up geodesics can be a sort of singularity. This is a mass inflation singularity, which involves some complexity beyond this discussion. In effect this is due to a black hole not being an eternal solution but something that is generated physically. Fields and particles that enter a black hole are described by lowering quantum operators, with Bogoliubov coefficients etc, and Hawking radiation by raising operators. The mass inflation singularity is in the case of Kerr and related RN and KN spacetimes contained inside the black hole and are then not naked singularities in the standard sense.

 

> The point of the NP-complete algorithm and the soap bubble demonstration is that nature does not solve them. 

Then the entire NP issue is irrelevant as far as consciousness is concerned because my conscious brain produces consciousness and its natural and physical,  but my  brain can’t solve NP-complete algorithms in polynomial time any better than computer can, in fact I can't even do as well as at is as computers.

The subject of NP-completeness came up because of my conjecture about there being a sort of code associated with a conscious entity that is not computable or if computable is intractable in NP. It could have some bearing on the ability to emulate consciousness in a computer.

This topic of NP-completeness is of interest to me with respect to quantum error correction codes for black holes and AdS spacetime. This has some bearing on MH spacetimes, for mass inflation might only be avoided if there is some perfect quantum error correction code. This requires of course that the black hole be "physically eternal," which means there is a constant source of ingoing matter-fields that compensates for the loss due to Hawking radiation. Such a black hole would exist in an anti-de Sitter spacetime. In fact since the horizon states of the black hole would "mirror" states on the boundary this problem is pertinent to AdS spacetimes in general. 

The "map" being a mathematical system that pertains to mathematics is a case of a map to a map. This is different from a "map" that is mathematical or in the syntax of mathematics, and territory that is physical reality. the idea the two can be made identical strikes me as a piece of untestable metaphysics. Bruno seems disposed to this idea and Max Tegmark has related ideas. I think these things are not really scientifically credible ideas.

When given the choice of ending my life 20 or 30 years prematurely with the promise of being uploaded into a computer for nearly eternal life, or spending a few hours this day at a pub drinking beer, I will go with the beer thank you.

I don't think evolution tells us much about consciousness. We might of course have the case that we humans make conscious choices that influence genes. With the start of Tudor England after the War of the Roses the idea came about to clean England of people and their families who had a history of miscreant behavior. They were sent to the new colonies in America to work as indentured servants to the "neo-nobility" who set up plantations growing sorgum, tobacco and later cotton. They were called trash, and the term white trash  exists to this day. Considering how many white southerners are given to wreckless or red-necked behavior you have to ponder whether they had the right idea on heritability.

LC

[Telmo Menezes]

> NONSENSE! Evolution produced me. I know with 100% certainty that I am
> conscious. I very strongly suspect billions of other things are conscious
> too. I know for a fact Evolution can detect intelligent behavior but it
> can’t detect consciousness and yet I am consciousness. Therefor
> consciousness MUST be a byproduct intelligence. Evolution says as much about
> consciousness as there is to say, it is the best purely logical argument
> against solipsism, in fact it is the only one, all the others are just
> variations of “my initiation says its untrue” or “solipsism is too strange
> to be true”.

This assumes that if evolution produced X, then any property of X is
also a product of evolution. It is trivially not the case. For
example, you have mass and an electromagnetic field and a temperature,
and yet neither mass nor electromagnetism nor temperature are products
of evolution.

Telmo.

[John Clark]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:16 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:

>>  Evolution produced me. I know with 100% certainty that I am conscious. I very strongly suspect billions of other things are conscious too. I know for a fact Evolution can detect intelligent behavior but it can’t detect consciousness and yet I am consciousness. Therefor   consciousness MUST be a byproduct intelligence. Evolution says as much about   consciousness as there is to say, it is the best purely logical argument against solipsism, in fact it is the only one, all the others are just variations of “my initiation says its untrue” or “solipsism is too strange to be true”.

 

> This assumes that if evolution produced X, then any property of X is also a product of evolution.

Not any property

​of​

 X, just any property the parts of X didn't have before Evolution started its work. You walk into a bakery and see a cake and you assume the baker made the cake. Do you also assume the baker made the flower in the cake, and the carbon in the flower, and the protons in the carbon, and the quarks in the protons?  
 

> It is trivially not the case. For example, you have mass and an electromagnetic field and a temperature, and yet neither mass nor electromagnetism nor temperature are products

​ ​

of evolution.

I know Evolution produced my physical brain and I know with 100% certainty my brain is conscious, however I do not know with 100% certainty that mass or electromagnetism or temperature are conscious, in fact I rather suspect they are not and there is only one reason I have that suspicion, they do not behave intelligently.  

 John K Clark   

[Telmo Menezes]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 5:18 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:16 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>
> wrote:
>>>
>>> >> Evolution produced me. I know with 100% certainty that I am
>>> >> conscious. I very strongly suspect billions of other things are conscious
>>> >> too. I know for a fact Evolution can detect intelligent behavior but it
>>> >> can’t detect consciousness and yet I am consciousness. Therefor
>>> >> consciousness MUST be a byproduct intelligence. Evolution says as much about
>>> >> consciousness as there is to say, it is the best purely logical argument
>>> >> against solipsism, in fact it is the only one, all the others are just
>>> >> variations of “my initiation says its untrue” or “solipsism is too strange
>>> >> to be true”.
>>
>>
>>
>> > This assumes that if evolution produced X, then any property of X is
>> > also a product of evolution.
>
>
> Not any property
> of
> X, just any property the parts of X didn't have before Evolution started
> its work. You walk into a bakery and see a cake and you assume the baker
> made the cake. Do you also assume the baker made the flower in the cake, and
> the carbon in the flower, and the protons in the carbon, and the quarks in
> the protons?

No, because the cake is an improbable thing, while protons are
probable things. I don't know how probable consciousness is. As you
said, I cannot detect it.

>>
>> > It is trivially not the case. For example, you have mass and an
>> > electromagnetic field and a temperature, and yet neither mass nor
>> > electromagnetism nor temperature are products
>> of evolution.
>
> I know Evolution produced my physical brain and I know with 100% certainty
> my brain is conscious,

But you don't know what else is conscious.

> however I do not know with 100% certainty that mass
> or electromagnetism or temperature are conscious, in fact I rather suspect
> they are not and there is only one reason I have that suspicion, they do not
> behave intelligently.

Intelligent behavior is relative to humans. It just means that you are
good at the things that are necessary to succeed in a specific
evolutionary niche that the Lovecraftian-horror a.k.a. nature
produced. It also produced myriad other things.

Humans are terribly complex, and it might be that consciousness arises
from terribly complex things, or from certain types of terribly
complex things. But I don't really know and neither do you.

Telmo.

> John K Clark

[Lawrence Crowell]

In a part what you say is spot on. The problem with consciousness is there is a lot more ignorance about it than much in the way of certain knowledge. It may be a sort of epiphenomenon that emerges from some class of complex systems, which at this time we do know understand. Roger Penrose thinks it is something is a triality of physics, mathematics and mind, which is a sort of Platonic look. Dennett on the other hand thinks consciousness is a sort of illusion, which is a sort of epiphenomenon. Dennett calls it a hetererophenomenon as it involves a sort of game of multiple drafts. We really do not know for sure what consciousness is. 

I can think of things that strike me as obstructions to the idea of uploading brain states to a computer. The issue of NP-completeness seems plausible, and classic NP-complete problems are combinatorial systems which the brain is an example of. Other questions seem to make this problematic. It does seem to me the barrier of ignorance is far higher than our ability to vault over it.

LC

[John Clark]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:02 AM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The MH spacetimes have Cauchy horizons that because they pile up geodesics can be a sort of singularity.

That’s not the only thing they have, MH spacetimes also have closed timelike curves and logical paradoxes produced by them, one of them being the one found by Turing. They also have naked singularities that nobody has ever seen the slightest hint of. And if you need to go to as exotic a place as the speculative interior of a Black Hole to find a reason why Cryonics might not work I am greatly encouraged. 

> The subject of NP-completeness came up because of my conjecture about there being a sort of code associated with a conscious entity that is not computable or if computable is intractable in NP. 

NP-completeness is sorta weird and consciousness is sorta weird, but other than that is there any reason to think the two things are related?

> It could have some bearing on the ability to emulate consciousness in a computer.

How do you figure that? Both my brain and my computer are made of matter that obeys the laws of physics, and matter that obeys the laws of physics has never been observed to compute NP-complete problems in polynomial time, much less less find the answer to a non-computable question, like “what is the 7918th Busy Beaver number?”. The Busy Beaver function is far worse than NP complete, it starts out modestly enough but soon becomes non-computable. Scott Aaronson rigorously proved two years ago that BB(7918) is not computable, even a Jupiter Brain will never know what that number is because although it is finite even the very laws of physics don't know what it is. But much smaller Busy Beaver numbers might also be non-computable. We can compute the first 4 Busy Beaver numbers, and they are 1, 6, 21 and 107, but after that things go nuts. We know that BB(5) might be 47,176,870 but might be much larger, and BB(6) might be 7.4*10^36534 but might be much larger, and BB(7) is greater than 10^10^10^10^10^7  but how much greater nobody knows.

 > The "map" being a mathematical system that pertains to mathematics is a case of a map to a map. This is different from a "map" that is mathematical or in the syntax of mathematics, and territory that is physical reality.

As I said, a Ulam spiral is a map of the prime numbers and that map is the territory. And  the prime number 7 has as much or as little physical reality as my consciousness does.

 > the idea the two can be made identical strikes me as a piece of untestable metaphysics.

True but you are saying they are not identical and that is also untestable metaphysics. In cases like this Occam razor is helpful, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then its a duck, and if a computer behaves just like me then it is conscious just like me.  

> When given the choice of ending my life 20 or 30 years prematurely 

I never said anything about you ending your life 20 or 30 years prematurely but suppose a doctor told you that you had a disease that would destroy your brain in a few months and turn you into vegetable, although your heart may keep beating for another 20 or 30 years; would you give uploading a second look then?

> with the promise of being uploaded into a computer for nearly eternal life, or spending a few hours this day at a pub drinking beer, I will go with the beer thank you.

Well I guess not, you’d trade a nearly eternal life for a few hours of pub drinking. Well to each there own. As for me I’m very curious about what the future holds so I generally prefer existence over oblivion, but there is no disputing matter of taste although I do wonder if you oppose Cryonics because you think it won’t work or because you think it might.

> I don't think evolution tells us much about consciousness. 

If intelligent behavior doesn't produce consciousness please explain why Evolution bothered to make you conscious. And if it does then please explain why you don't conclude that a intelligently behaving computer is not conscious. 

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 12:34 PM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:

 

>> You walk into a bakery and see a cake and you assume the baker made the cake. Do you also assume the baker made the flower in the cake, and  the carbon in the flower, and the protons in the carbon, and the quarks in the protons?

 

> No, because the cake is an improbable thing, while protons are  probable things. I don't know how probable consciousness is. 

But I do know that the bakers brain is far more improbable  than a cake

​,​

and mass and an electromagnetic field and temperature are even more probable than protons, so why do you demand Evolution produce mass and temperature and electromagnetic fields but

​you ​

don't demand the baker produce protons?

> I don't know how probable consciousness is. 

But I can make a educated guess because I know that most things don't behave intelagently and I also know that when I become less conscious I also become less intelligent.

> Humans are terribly complex 

Yes, and evolution didn't bother to put in all that complexity because its a nice guy and figured we'd like consciousness, it did it because intelligent behavior has survival value.

> and it might be that consciousness arises  from terribly complex things, or from certain types of terribly  complex things. But I don't really know and neither do you.

I don't really know that human cadavers are not conscious, but they

​sure​

​

don't behave intelligently so my hunch is they are not.

​W​

hat is your hunch?

John K 

​Clark​

 

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Sunday, March 18, 2018 at 3:51:13 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:02 AM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The MH spacetimes have Cauchy horizons that because they pile up geodesics can be a sort of singularity.

That’s not the only thing they have, MH spacetimes also have closed timelike curves and logical paradoxes produced by them, one of them being the one found by Turing. They also have naked singularities that nobody has ever seen the slightest hint of. And if you need to go to as exotic a place as the speculative interior of a Black Hole to find a reason why Cryonics might not work I am greatly encouraged. 

Not all MH spaces have closed timelike curves.

 

> The subject of NP-completeness came up because of my conjecture about there being a sort of code associated with a conscious entity that is not computable or if computable is intractable in NP. 

NP-completeness is sorta weird and consciousness is sorta weird, but other than that is there any reason to think the two things are related?

This seems to be something you are not registering. Classic NP-complete problems involve cataloging subgraphs and determining the rules for all subgraphs in a graph. There are other similar combinatoric problems that are NP complete. A map from a brain to a computer is going to require knowing how to handle these problems. Quantum computers do not help much.

 

> It could have some bearing on the ability to emulate consciousness in a computer.

How do you figure that? Both my brain and my computer are made of matter that obeys the laws of physics, and matter that obeys the laws of physics has never been observed to compute NP-complete problems in polynomial time, much less less find the answer to a non-computable question, like “what is the 7918th Busy Beaver number?”.

And for this reason it could be impossible to map brain states into a computer and capture a person completely. Of course brains and computers are made of matter. So is a pile of shit also made of matter. Based on what we know about bacteria and their network communicating by electrical potentials the pile of shit may have more in the way of consciousness than a computer. 

As for the rest I think a lot of this sort of idea is chasing after some crazy dream. There is in some ways a problem with doing that. As things stand now I would not do the upload.  Below is a picture of some aspect of this. 

LC

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/18/2018 7:51 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 12:04 AM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> The evolutionary argument is a good one for brains like humans and other animals.  But it may be that consciousness is only entailed by intelligence that is realized by neural nets with limited memory or some other constraints that are accidents of the evolution of intelligence on Earth.

So limited memory is a requirement for consciousness and other constraints may be needed too, so there is a inverse relationship,

I wrote "OR other constraints".

the smarter you are the less conscious you become. Well maybe, I can't prove the idea is wrong with mathematical rigor but if its true then its odd that when I get very sleepy I become less conscious and if you were observing me at the time you'd say my IQ was about 50 points lower than it was when I was not sleepy.

It's not about your variation over time, it's about variation from one intelligent species to another.  For example, octopuses are fairly intelligent but their neural structure is distributed very differently from mammals of similar intelligence.  An artificial intelligence that was not modeled on mammalian brain structure might be intelligent but not conscious or conscious in some very different way.  I'm not claiming I know this is so; I'm claiming that the evolutionary argument doesn't apply to such an AI or to some species (like octopuses) that are not on our evolutionary branch.

Brent

> Intelligence realized in some other way might not be conscious

You can play the maybe game for eternity. Maybe my fellow human beings are intelligent in some other way than I am intelligent and are therefore not conscious. Actually in this case there is no maybe about it, you ARE intelligent in some way different from me, otherwise you'd be me and I'd be you.

> or might be conscious in different way that we couldn't recognize as such.

Maybe. We don't recognize trees and rocks and human cadavers as being conscious because they don't behave intelligently, but maybe they are. Maybe, but I doubt it.

  John K Clark

 

--

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 19 March 2018 at 12:14, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, March 18, 2018 at 3:51:13 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:02 AM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The MH spacetimes have Cauchy horizons that because they pile up geodesics can be a sort of singularity.

That’s not the only thing they have, MH spacetimes also have closed timelike curves and logical paradoxes produced by them, one of them being the one found by Turing. They also have naked singularities that nobody has ever seen the slightest hint of. And if you need to go to as exotic a place as the speculative interior of a Black Hole to find a reason why Cryonics might not work I am greatly encouraged. 

Not all MH spaces have closed timelike curves.

 

> The subject of NP-completeness came up because of my conjecture about there being a sort of code associated with a conscious entity that is not computable or if computable is intractable in NP. 

NP-completeness is sorta weird and consciousness is sorta weird, but other than that is there any reason to think the two things are related?

This seems to be something you are not registering. Classic NP-complete problems involve cataloging subgraphs and determining the rules for all subgraphs in a graph. There are other similar combinatoric problems that are NP complete. A map from a brain to a computer is going to require knowing how to handle these problems. Quantum computers do not help much.

 

> It could have some bearing on the ability to emulate consciousness in a computer.

How do you figure that? Both my brain and my computer are made of matter that obeys the laws of physics, and matter that obeys the laws of physics has never been observed to compute NP-complete problems in polynomial time, much less less find the answer to a non-computable question, like “what is the 7918th Busy Beaver number?”.

And for this reason it could be impossible to map brain states into a computer and capture a person completely. Of course brains and computers are made of matter. So is a pile of shit also made of matter. Based on what we know about bacteria and their network communicating by electrical potentials the pile of shit may have more in the way of consciousness than a computer. 

As for the rest I think a lot of this sort of idea is chasing after some crazy dream. There is in some ways a problem with doing that. As things stand now I would not do the upload.  Below is a picture of some aspect of this. 

Could you say if you think the observable behaviour of the brain (and hence of the person whose muscles are controlled by the brain) could be replaced by a computer, and, if the answer is yes, if you still think it is possible that the consciousness might not be preserved? And if the answer is also yes to the second question, what you think it would be like if your consciousness was changed by replacing part of your brain, but your brain still forced your body to behave in the same way?

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/18/2018 2:51 PM, John Clark wrote:

If intelligent behavior doesn't produce consciousness please explain why Evolution bothered to make you conscious.

It may have been inevitable, given what evolution had to work with, but that doesn't mean that intelligent behavior realized in a different (e.g. von Neumann machine instead of a neural net) way would be conscious.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/18/2018 6:14 PM, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

And for this reason it could be impossible to map brain states into a computer and capture a person completely.

I don't think anyone would argue for "completely".  At a minimum recent memory would be lost.  But considering how much "personality" survives drastic brain damage, it seems that uploading might be worthwhile even if not every accurate.

Brent

[Lawrence Crowell]

I really do not know. I will say if it is possible in principle to replace the executive parts of the brain with a computer, but where the result could be a sort of zombie. There are too many unknowns and unknowns with no Bayesian priors, or unknown unknowns. We are in a domain of possibles, plausibles and maybe a Jupiter computer-brain. There is so little to go with this, and to be honest a lot more possible obstructions I might see than realities, that almost nothing can be said with much certainty.

LC

[Stathis Papaioannou]

Consider not a zombie but a brain in the process of zombification. A piece of the brain is replaced with an electronic implant which replicates its I/O behaviour as it interacts with the surrounding biological tissue but, by assumption, does not participate in consciousness. It is believed, for example, that visual experiences arise in the occipital cortex, and lesions here cause partial or complete blindness. So if the implant in the visual cortex lacked the special quality giving rise to visual experiences, the subject should have this large deficit in his consciousness. But although he might want to yell out that he is blind, his vocal cords receive the same input from motor neurones that they would normally, since the output from the visual cortex is the same, and he declares that nothing has changed and he can see perfectly well.

The scenario above is used in a reductio ad absurdum (supporting the idea that any functionally equivalent system must preserve consciousness) in the following paper:

http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Telmo Menezes]

I am on the Platonist camp, but fully realize that this is a personal
bet / intuition. I agree with Bruno that if computationalism is true,
then consciousness cannot be an epiphenomenon. But we don't know if
computationalism is true.

Dennett I just find just silly. I think he plays with words, and
accepting his arguments would force me to deny something (the only
thing) that I absolutely know to be true.

> I can think of things that strike me as obstructions to the idea of
> uploading brain states to a computer. The issue of NP-completeness seems
> plausible, and classic NP-complete problems are combinatorial systems which
> the brain is an example of. Other questions seem to make this problematic.
> It does seem to me the barrier of ignorance is far higher than our ability
> to vault over it.

Agreed. I'm not sure we will ever be able to understand consciousness
-- there is really no reason to assume that this is possible. If it
is, I bet that it will require a quantitative jump in our
understanding of reality. I most definitely do not believe that it can
be solved by incrementalist research in neuroscience.

Telmo.

> LC

[Telmo Menezes]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:38 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 12:34 PM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>
> wrote:
>
>>>
>>> >> You walk into a bakery and see a cake and you assume the baker made
>>> >> the cake. Do you also assume the baker made the flower in the cake, and the
>>> >> carbon in the flower, and the protons in the carbon, and the quarks in the
>>> >> protons?
>>
>>
>>
>> > No, because the cake is an improbable thing, while protons are probable
>> > things. I don't know how probable consciousness is.
>
>
> But I do know that the bakers brain is far more improbable than a cake
> ,
> and mass and an electromagnetic field and temperature are even more probable
> than protons, so why do you demand Evolution produce mass and temperature
> and electromagnetic fields but
> you
> don't demand the baker produce protons?

I demand no such thing. On the contrary, I am pointing out that just
because you have a certain property, it doesn't follow that this
property was created be evolution. Evolution is a theory about the
complexification of biological systems. Nothing more, nothing less.

>> > I don't know how probable consciousness is.
>
>
> But I can make a educated guess because I know that most things don't behave
> intelagently and I also know that when I become less conscious I also become
> less intelligent.
>
>> > Humans are terribly complex
>
>
> Yes, and evolution didn't bother to put in all that complexity because its a
> nice guy and figured we'd like consciousness, it did it because intelligent
> behavior has survival value.

Human-like intelligent behavior is a successful strategy in a very
narrow evolutionary niche. We are one thermonuclear war away from
nature "deciding" that human-like intelligence is not so useful after
all. Evolution is constant adaptation to the environment, with some
self-referenciality because the things evolved become part of, and
change the environment.

>> > and it might be that consciousness arises from terribly complex things,
>> > or from certain types of terribly complex things. But I don't really know
>> > and neither do you.
>
>
> I don't really know that human cadavers are not conscious, but they
> sure
> don't behave intelligently so my hunch is they are not.
> W
> hat is your hunch?

My hunch is that I am mind in a universe made of mind. I believe
modern physics is both valid and useful (and a lot of fun), but I do
not know that it studies fundamental reality and I believe nobody else
knows either.

[Lawrence Crowell]

There may be scaling issues with this. If a patient were to have 10% of neurons replaced in some brain system the impact on conscious awareness might not be that pronounced. At some threshold there may be a sufficient change in the network structure that profound changes may take place. Further, as network subfunction is NP-complete it may be impossible to establish how a brain function is segmented into networks well enough to duplicate the whole thing.

Folks, this stuff is clearly far more difficult than most are thinking. You can also be sure that in the future when this becomes more experimental that surprises and obstructions will appear.

LC

[Lawrence Crowell]

I am not particularly in the Platonist camp. I see Platonism and other philosophical ideas as just grist for the mill.

Dennett's approach has some merit as at least opening a door for some possible testable approaches to consciousness. I have no idea whether this entire construction is realistic or not.

LC

On Monday, March 19, 2018 at 7:01:04 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote:

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 9:29 PM, Lawrence Crowell

>
>

[John Clark]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:02 AM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>  NP-completeness is sorta weird and consciousness is sorta weird, but other than that is there any reason to think the two things are related?

 

> This seems to be something you are not registering.

You’ve got that right.

> Classic NP-complete problems involve cataloging subgraphs and determining the rules for all subgraphs in a graph. There are other similar combinatoric problems that are NP complete.

That’s nice. I repeat my question, NP-completeness is sorta weird and consciousness is sorta weird, but other than that is there any reason to think the two things are related?

> A map from a brain to a computer is going to require knowing how to handle these problems. 

That is utterly ridiculous! Duplicating a map is not a NP-complete problem, in fact its not much of a problem at all, a Xerox machine can do it. In this case we're not trying to find the shortest path or even a shorted path than the one the trailing salesman took. All we need do is take the path the salesman already took. 

> Quantum computers do not help much.

It would be great to have a quantum computer but would not be necessary for uploading or for AI, it would just be icing on the cake.  

 > It could have some bearing on the ability to emulate consciousness in a computer.

Yes, and the Goldbach conjecture might have some bearing on the ability to emulate consciousness in a computer too, but there is not one particle of evidence to suggest that either of the two actually does. There are a infinite number of things and concepts in the universe and not one of them has been ruled out as having somethings to do with consciousness, and that’s why consciousness theories are so easy to come up with and why they are so completely useless. Intelligence theories are a different matter entirely, they are testable. 

>> How do you figure that? Both my brain and my computer are made of matter that obeys the laws of physics, and matter that obeys the laws of physics has never been observed to compute NP-complete problems in polynomial time, much less less find the answer to a non-computable question, like “what is the 7918th Busy Beaver number?”.

 

> And for this reason it could be impossible to map brain states into a computer and capture a person completely. 

How do you figure that? A computer can never find the 7918th Busy Beaver number but my consciousness can never find it either. I’ll be damned if I see how one thing has anything to do with the other. It seems to me that you don’t want computers to be conscious so you looked for a problem that a computer can never solve and just decreed that problem must have something to do with consciousness. But computers can’t find the 7918th Busy Beaver number because the laws of physics can’t find it, even the universe itself doesn’t know what that finite number is. But I know for a fact that the universe does know how to arrange atoms so they behave in a johnkclarkian way and become conscious. The universe doesn't know how to solve NP complete problems in polynomial time, much less NP hard problems, much less flat out non-computable problems like the busy Beaver, so I don't see how any of them could have anything to do with consciousness. 

> Of course brains and computers are made of matter. So is a pile of shit also made of matter. 

Exactly, and the only difference between my brain and a pile of shit is the way the generic atoms are arranged, and the only difference between a cadaver and a healthy living person is the way the generic atoms are arranged. One carbon atom is identical to another so the only thing that specifies something as being me or a cadaver or pile of shit is the information on how to arrange those atoms.

> Based on what we know about bacteria and their network communicating by electrical potentials the pile of shit may have more in the way of consciousness than a computer. 

Maybe maybe maybe. The above is a excellent example of what I was talking about, consciousness theories are utterly and completely useless. Is this really the best you can do? Are piles of shit and the interior of Black Holes the only places you can find arguments against Cryonics?

> As things stand now I would not do the upload.  

But is that because you believe there is no change of it working or because you believe there is? I think the chances are greater than zero but less than 100% and I’m not afraid to give it a try. After all, I have the money and if it doesn’t work it won’t make me any deader. 

There is a excellent article by Kenneth Hayworth on the nuts and bolts of how this uploading procedure might work from the present day when you undergo the procedure to about 70 years in the future where you’re revived and uploaded into a robot body:

http://www.brainpreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/vitrifyingtheconnectomicself_hayworth.pdf

Kenneth Hayworth is the guy who developed the new Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation method. I remember when people talked about how ice crystals would rupture cells and freezing the brain would turn it into mush; well Hayworth froze a pig brain down to −130 C (−202 F) then he warmed it back up to room temperature and took a series of 3D pictures of it with a electron microscope. The detail is amazing! I would have been delighted if the pictures were made when the brain was still frozen but this is even better because the rewarming is when most of the damage happens. See for yourself:

http://www.brainpreservation.org/

John K Clark 

[John Clark]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 10:03 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote

> octopuses are fairly intelligent but their neural structure is distributed very differently from mammals of similar intelligence.  An artificial intelligence that was not modeled on mammalian brain structure might be intelligent but not conscious

Maybe maybe maybe.

​A​

nd you don't have have the exact same brain structure as I have so you might be intelligent but not conscious. I said it before I'll say it again, consciousness theories are useless, and not just the ones on this list, all of them.

John K Clark

[Russell Standish]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 05:19:11PM -0400, John Clark wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 10:03 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote
>

> *> octopuses are fairly intelligent but their neural structure is

> > distributed very differently from mammals of similar intelligence. An
> > artificial intelligence that was not modeled on mammalian brain structure

> > might be intelligent but not conscious*

>
>
> Maybe maybe maybe.
> ​A​
> nd you don't have have the exact same brain structure as I have so you
> might be intelligent but not conscious. I said it before I'll say it again,
> consciousness theories are useless, and not just the ones on this list, all
> of them.
>
> John K Clark

In my backyard, pretty much about 200m from where I'm sitting now, we
have these amazing creatures called giant cuttlefish. These are about
the size of a dog (which breed of dog you say? - well yes there's that
sort of variation in size too). They (like most cephalopods) are
masters of camouflage. To be really effective in camouflage, you need
to know what the things you're hiding from is seeing. Cuttlefish use
different camo patterns and communication methods depending on whether they're
trying to avoid sharks or dolphins. I had the experience of one of
these animals approaching me looking for all the world like a bunch of
kelp. The instant I saw its eyes, it knew its disguise was blown, and
it scarpered. I had the strong feeling that here was an animal reading
my mind as I its. I can't be sure, of course, but I'm pretty convinced
from that cuttlefish are conscious beings. It seems hard to imagine them
being able to understand other animals minds without also being aware
of their own, and their place in the world.

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 8:13 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:

​> ​

I am pointing out that just

​ 

because you have a certain property, it doesn't follow that this
property was created be evolution. 

​And I am pointing out that if a property didn't exist before Evolution started its work but it did afterword then, unless there are strong reasons to think otherwise, its reasonable to conclude that evolution produced it. ​

 

​> ​Evolution is a theory about the

​ 

complexification of biological systems. 

​And the most complex thing Evolution ever produced is the human brain. And Evolution can see intelligent behavior but not consciousness. 

And when my brain changes my consciousness changes. And when my consciousness ​changes my brain changes.

 

​What more do I need to conclude that consciousness is produced by my brain and is probably a byproduct of intelligence and therefore I am probably correct in concluding I am not the only conscious being in the universe? ​If you have a better argument against solipsism I'd love to head it.

>

​>​

I don't really know that human cadavers are not conscious, but they

​

 sure

​ 

don't behave intelligently so my hunch is they are not. What is your hunch?

​> ​My hunch is that I am mind in a universe made of mind. I believe

​ 

modern physics is both valid and useful (and a lot of fun), but I do

​ 

not know that it studies fundamental reality and I believe nobody else

​ 

knows either.

​That's ​nice, but you didn't answer my question. My suspicion is that cadavers are not conscious because they display the same degree of intelligence as a rock or a tree does. But what about you, do you suspect cadavers are conscious, if not why not?

John K Clark 

 

[Stathis Papaioannou]

It is possible that consciousness is fully preserved until a threshold is reached then suddenly disappears. So if half the subject’s brain is replaced, he behaves normally and has normal consciousness, but if one more neurone is replaced he continues to behave normally but becomes a zombie. Moreover, since neurones are themselves complex systems it could be broken down further: half of that final neurone could be replaced with no change to consciousness, but when a particular membrane protein is replaced with a non-biological nanomachine the subject will suddenly become a zombie. And we need not stop here, because this protein molecule could also be replaced gradually, for example by non-biological radioisotopes. If half the atoms in this protein are replaced, there is no change in behaviour and no change in consciousness; but when one more atom is replaced a threshold is reached and the subject suddenly loses consciousness. So zombification could turn on the addition or subtraction of one neutron. Are you prepared to go this far to challenge the idea that if the observable behaviour of the brain is replicated, consciousness will also be replicated?

Further, as network subfunction is NP-complete it may be impossible to establish how a brain function is segmented into networks well enough to duplicate the whole thing.

Folks, this stuff is clearly far more difficult than most are thinking. You can also be sure that in the future when this becomes more experimental that surprises and obstructions will appear. 

It is a theoretical rather than practical question. 

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Bruce Kellett]

From: Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com>

It is possible that consciousness is fully preserved until a threshold is reached then suddenly disappears. So if half the subject’s brain is replaced, he behaves normally and has normal consciousness, but if one more neurone is replaced he continues to behave normally but becomes a zombie. Moreover, since neurones are themselves complex systems it could be broken down further: half of that final neurone could be replaced with no change to consciousness, but when a particular membrane protein is replaced with a non-biological nanomachine the subject will suddenly become a zombie. And we need not stop here, because this protein molecule could also be replaced gradually, for example by non-biological radioisotopes. If half the atoms in this protein are replaced, there is no change in behaviour and no change in consciousness; but when one more atom is replaced a threshold is reached and the subject suddenly loses consciousness. So zombification could turn on the addition or subtraction of one neutron. Are you prepared to go this far to challenge the idea that if the observable behaviour of the brain is replicated, consciousness will also be replicated?

If the theory is that if the observable behaviour of the brain is replicated, then consciousness will also be replicated, then the clear corollary is that consciousness can be inferred from observable behaviour. Which implies that I can be as certain of the consciousness of other people as I am of my own. This seems to do some violence to the 1p/1pp/3p distinctions that computationalism rely on so much: only 1p is "certainly certain". But if I can reliably infer consciousness in others, then other things can be as certain as 1p experiences.....

Bruce

[Telmo Menezes]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 12:06 AM, Bruce Kellett
<bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> From: Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com>
>
>
> It is possible that consciousness is fully preserved until a threshold is
> reached then suddenly disappears. So if half the subject’s brain is
> replaced, he behaves normally and has normal consciousness, but if one more
> neurone is replaced he continues to behave normally but becomes a zombie.
> Moreover, since neurones are themselves complex systems it could be broken
> down further: half of that final neurone could be replaced with no change to
> consciousness, but when a particular membrane protein is replaced with a
> non-biological nanomachine the subject will suddenly become a zombie. And we
> need not stop here, because this protein molecule could also be replaced
> gradually, for example by non-biological radioisotopes. If half the atoms in
> this protein are replaced, there is no change in behaviour and no change in
> consciousness; but when one more atom is replaced a threshold is reached and
> the subject suddenly loses consciousness. So zombification could turn on the
> addition or subtraction of one neutron. Are you prepared to go this far to
> challenge the idea that if the observable behaviour of the brain is
> replicated, consciousness will also be replicated?
>
>
> If the theory is that if the observable behaviour of the brain is
> replicated, then consciousness will also be replicated, then the clear
> corollary is that consciousness can be inferred from observable behaviour.

For this to be a theory in the scientific sense, one needs some way to
detect consciousness. In that case your corollary becomes a tautology:

(a) If one can detect consciousness then one can detect consciousness.

The other option is to assume that observable behaviors in the brain
imply consciousness -- because "common sense", because experts say so,
whatever. In this case it becomes circular reasoning:

(b) Assuming that observable behaviors in the brain imply
consciousness, consciousness can be inferred from brain behaviors.

> Which implies that I can be as certain of the consciousness of other people
> as I am of my own. This seems to do some violence to the 1p/1pp/3p
> distinctions that computationalism rely on so much: only 1p is "certainly
> certain".
> But if I can reliably infer consciousness in others, then other
> things can be as certain as 1p experiences.....

If one can detect 1p experiences then one can detect 1p experiences...

Telmo.

> Bruce

[Brent Meeker]

You're the one who floated a theory of consciousness based on evolution.  I'm just pointing out that it only shows that consciousness exists in humans for some evolutionarily selected purpose.  It doesn't apply to intelligence that arises in some other evolutionary branch or intelligence like AI that doesn't evolve but is designed.

Brent

[Bruce Kellett]

From: Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>

I was responding to the claim by Stathis that consciousness will follow replication of observable behaviour. It seemed to me that this was proposed as a theory: "If the observable behaviour of is replicated then consciousness will also be replicated." I was merely pointing out consequences of this theory, so your claims of tautology and/or circularity rather miss the point: the consequences of any theory are either tautologies or circularities in that sense, because they are implications of the theory.

Now it may be that you want to reject Stathis's calim, and insist that consciousness cannot be inferred from behaviour. But it seems to me that that theory is as lacking in independent verification as the contrary.

> Which implies that I can be as certain of the consciousness of other people
> as I am of my own. This seems to do some violence to the 1p/1pp/3p
> distinctions that computationalism rely on so much: only 1p is "certainly
> certain".
> But if I can reliably infer consciousness in others, then other
> things can be as certain as 1p experiences.....

If one can detect 1p experiences then one can detect 1p experiences...

The claim has more content than that.

Bruce

Telmo.

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Monday, March 19, 2018 at 3:02:28 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:02 AM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>  NP-completeness is sorta weird and consciousness is sorta weird, but other than that is there any reason to think the two things are related?

 

> This seems to be something you are not registering.

You’ve got that right.

> Classic NP-complete problems involve cataloging subgraphs and determining the rules for all subgraphs in a graph. There are other similar combinatoric problems that are NP complete.

That’s nice. I repeat my question, NP-completeness is sorta weird and consciousness is sorta weird, but other than that is there any reason to think the two things are related?

If you can't compute efficiently the map, the how do you know this system will really upload brain states in such as way that consciousness seemlessly carries from brain to computer? Even if the entity in the computer is conscious it might not actually be me. If I could duplicate myself which of the two would "be me?" The map problem is one involving graph theoretic problems that are NP-complete. As I see it there is a lot of hype here concealing the fact we really know every little about this.

LC

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 7:56 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

​> ​

You're the one who floated a theory of consciousness based on evolution. 

​I did indeed.​

 

​>​

I'm just pointing out that it only shows that consciousness exists in humans for some evolutionarily selected purpose. 

 NO! That is exactly what it doesn't show! Consciousness has no evolutionary purpose, it couldn't have because Evolution can't even detect consciousness, its no better at it than we are at detecting consciousness in others. So consciousness must be a byproduct of something that Evolution can detect, like intelligence. When a architect decides to put an arch inside a rectangular enclosure he doesn't separately decide to put a spandrel in there too because it would look nice, he gets the spandrel automatically whether he wants one or not. Consciousness is a biological spandrel.

John K Clark

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/19/2018 6:10 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 7:56 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

​> ​

You're the one who floated a theory of consciousness based on evolution. 

​I did indeed.​

 

​>​

I'm just pointing out that it only shows that consciousness exists in humans for some evolutionarily selected purpose. 

 NO! That is exactly what it doesn't show! Consciousness has no evolutionary purpose, it couldn't have because Evolution can't even detect consciousness, its no better at it than we are at detecting consciousness in others. So consciousness must be a byproduct of something that Evolution can detect, like intelligence.

But a necessary byproduct of hominid evolved intelligence; otherwise it could be dispensed with.  If it's a necessary byproduct that means it's necessary for our intelligence and so it exists for an evolutionarily selected reason.

When a architect decides to put an arch inside a rectangular enclosure he doesn't separately decide to put a spandrel in there too because it would look nice, he gets the spandrel automatically whether he wants one or not. Consciousness is a biological spandrel.

Fine.  But if the roof isn't supported by arches the spandrels don't appear.  If intelligence evolves via some other path (as in octopuses) or is designed rather than evolved the argument that it will be accompanied by consciousness fails.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 8:11 PM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

​>>​

That’s nice. I repeat my question, NP-completeness is sorta weird and consciousness is sorta weird, but other than that is there any reason to think the two things are related?

​

>  If you can't compute efficiently the map,

 I

​don't even know what ​"

compute efficiently the map

​" means.​

 

 

​> ​

how do you know this system will really upload brain states in such as way that consciousness seemlessly carries from brain to computer?

I don't know. I can never know for sure until I actually do it, if I notice that I'm not dead and I remember being me then and only then I'll know it worked. Maybe Black Holes and cadavers and piles of shit are conscious and maybe a computer that acts just like me is not, but I doubt it. In mattes like this all I can do is make a educated guess, and my guess is piles of shit are not conscious but a intelligent computer is.   

  

​>

Even if the entity in the computer is conscious it might not actually be me.

​If it remember being you then it is you.​

 

 

​> ​

If I could duplicate myself which of the two would "be me?"

That is a silly question. If you are duplicated in a duplicating machine then both are you because that's what the word "duplicated" means. I've gone over this crap for years with Bruno, if I wen't a

​n​

atheist I'd pray to God I don't have to repeat it with you.

  

​>​

 As I see it there is a lot of hype here concealing the fact we really know every little about this.

​But ​you seems to know all there about it, enough to quite literally bet your life on it not working.

​John K Clark​

 

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 9:25 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

​>> ​

NO! That is exactly what it doesn't show! Consciousness has no evolutionary purpose, it couldn't have because Evolution can't even detect consciousness, its no better at it than we are at detecting consciousness in others. So consciousness must be a byproduct of something that Evolution can detect, like intelligence.

​> ​

But a necessary byproduct of hominid evolved intelligence;

NO! Byproduct don't evolve anything, especially not consciousness because Evolution can't even see it.

 

​> ​

otherwise it could be dispensed with. 

​You can't dispose of a spandrel, it comes with the territory.  ​

​> ​

Fine.  But if the roof isn't supported by arches the spandrels don't appear. If intelligence evolves via some other path

​ ​

(as in octopuses) or is designed rather than evolved the argument that it will be accompanied by consciousness fails.

If there are many paths to intelligence it is probable that Evolution found the simplest, if only one of those paths leads to consciousness, our path, then it would be easier to make a intelligent computer that is conscious than to make a intelligent computer that has no consciousness. As I've said

​,​

you've got to make a educated guess and place a bet. And the stakes are very high.  

​John K Clark​

 

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/19/2018 7:21 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 9:25 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

​>> ​

NO! That is exactly what it doesn't show! Consciousness has no evolutionary purpose, it couldn't have because Evolution can't even detect consciousness, its no better at it than we are at detecting consciousness in others. So consciousness must be a byproduct of something that Evolution can detect, like intelligence.

​> ​

But a necessary byproduct of hominid evolved intelligence;

NO! Byproduct don't evolve anything, especially not consciousness because Evolution can't even see it.

"Byproduct don't evolve anything"?? Where did I say it did?  Have you been drinking?...you can usually keep your answers grammatical.

 

​> ​

otherwise it could be dispensed with. 

​You can't dispose of a spandrel, it comes with the territory.  ​

You contradict yourself.  "Comes with the territory" = "necessary by product".   So if consciousness is a spandrel it's a necessary byproduct...which means it's not really a byproduct, it's a feature...just not one that selection can act on.

​> ​

Fine.  But if the roof isn't supported by arches the spandrels don't appear. If intelligence evolves via some other path

​ ​

(as in octopuses) or is designed rather than evolved the argument that it will be accompanied by consciousness fails.

If there are many paths to intelligence it is probable that Evolution found the simplest,

That's laughable.  You must not have looked at cell metabolism.

if only one of those paths leads to consciousness, our path, then it would be easier to make a intelligent computer that is conscious than to make a intelligent computer that has no consciousness.

Maybe.  IF it's easy to copy brain architecture and function.  The question is, how will we know if we do.  If we copy brain architecture we'll have some reason to think intelligence => consciousness.  But if we adopt some other architecture, e.g. a mixed neural net + von Neumann, we'll be in the dark as to whether it's conscious.  My inclination would be ask it.  If it's intelligent enough to lie I'm willing to give it ethical status.

Brent

As I've said

​,​

you've got to make a educated guess and place a bet. And the stakes are very high.  

​John K Clark​

 

[Stathis Papaioannou]

You can’t reliable infer consciousness in others. What you can infer is that whatever consciousness an entity has, it will be preserved if functionally identical substitutions in its brain are made. You can’t know if a mouse is conscious, but you can know that if mouse neurones are replaced with functionally identical electronic neurones its behaviour will be the same and any consciousness it may have will also be the same.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Telmo Menezes]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 1:03 AM, Bruce Kellett

Lawrence is proposing that something specific about the brain might be
necessary for consciousness to arise. He proposed a scenario where
parts of the brain are replaced with a computer, and behavior is
maintained while consciousness is lost (p-zombie). Stathis is
proposing a thought experiment that attempts reductio ad absurdum on
this scenario. Although this is all interesting speculation, there is
no scientific theory, because there is no way to perform an
experiment, because there is no scientific instrument that detects
consciousness. In the end I still don't know, as scientific fact, if
others are conscious.

You were the first to call it a theory, and this is why I reacted.

> I was merely pointing out
> consequences of this theory, so your claims of tautology and/or circularity
> rather miss the point: the consequences of any theory are either tautologies
> or circularities in that sense, because they are implications of the theory.

Tautologies are fine indeed. I did not call (a) a tautology as an
insult, merely to point out that the hard part is still missing, and
that assuming that it is solved does not lead to anywhere interesting.

Circularities are, of course, not fine. You cannot assume that you can
infer consciousness from behavior, and that use this assumption to
conclude that you can infer consciousness from behavior.

> Now it may be that you want to reject Stathis's calim, and insist that
> consciousness cannot be inferred from behaviour. But it seems to me that
> that theory is as lacking in independent verification as the contrary.

Again, no theory. I am just stating the simple fact that, since there
is no known instrument so far that can detect consciousness in the 3p,
then it is not possible to propose scientific theories about
consciousness at the moment. Only conjectures.

If you want my conjecture: I assume that all living things are
conscious. If you show me an AI that behaves like a human being (or
even a dog) I will assume it's conscious too. But none of this is
science.

I strongly suspect that consciousness is something that cannot, in
fact, be studied by science -- because consciousness is what does
science. It's like asking you to look inside your eyeballs.

>> Which implies that I can be as certain of the consciousness of other
>> people
>> as I am of my own. This seems to do some violence to the 1p/1pp/3p
>> distinctions that computationalism rely on so much: only 1p is "certainly
>> certain".
>> But if I can reliably infer consciousness in others, then other
>> things can be as certain as 1p experiences.....
>
> If one can detect 1p experiences then one can detect 1p experiences...
>
>
> The claim has more content than that.

I don't see how.

Telmo.

> Bruce
>
>
>
>
> Telmo.

[Stathis Papaioannou]

The interesting thing is that you can draw conclusions about consciousness without being able to define it or detect it. The claim is that IF an entity is conscious THEN its consciousness will be preserved if brain function is preserved despite changing the brain substrate.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Telmo Menezes]

I agree.

> The claim is that IF an entity
> is conscious THEN its consciousness will be preserved if brain function is
> preserved despite changing the brain substrate.

Ok, this is computationalism. I also bet on computationalism, but I
think we must proceed with caution and not forget that we are just
assuming this to be true. Your thought experiment is convincing but is
not a proof. You do expose something that I agree with: that
non-computationalism sounds silly.

Telmo.

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 11:08 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

​>

​>>​

​But a necessary byproduct of hominid evolved intelligence;

​>> ​

NO! Byproduct don't evolve anything, especially not consciousness because Evolution can't even see it.

​> ​

"Byproduct don't evolve anything"?? Where did I say it did? 

​"

a necessary byproduct of hominid evolved intelligence

​"​

 

​> ​

Have you been drinking?

​No, but you may make me start.​

 

​

John K Clark​

 

...you can usually keep your answers grammatical.

 

​> ​

otherwise it could be dispensed with. 

​You can't dispose of a spandrel, it comes with the territory.  ​

You contradict yourself.  "Comes with the territory" = "necessary by product".   So if consciousness is a spandrel it's a necessary byproduct...which means it's not really a byproduct, it's a feature...just not one that selection can act on.

​> ​

Fine.  But if the roof isn't supported by arches the spandrels don't appear. If intelligence evolves via some other path

​ ​

(as in octopuses) or is designed rather than evolved the argument that it will be accompanied by consciousness fails.

If there are many paths to intelligence it is probable that Evolution found the simplest,

That's laughable.  You must not have looked at cell metabolism.

if only one of those paths leads to consciousness, our path, then it would be easier to make a intelligent computer that is conscious than to make a intelligent computer that has no consciousness.

Maybe.  IF it's easy to copy brain architecture and function.  The question is, how will we know if we do.  If we copy brain architecture we'll have some reason to think intelligence => consciousness.  But if we adopt some other architecture, e.g. a mixed neural net + von Neumann, we'll be in the dark as to whether it's conscious.  My inclination would be ask it.  If it's intelligent enough to lie I'm willing to give it ethical status.

Brent

As I've said

​,​

you've got to make a educated guess and place a bet. And the stakes are very high.  

​John K Clark​

 

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 7:06 PM, Bruce Kellett <bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> If the theory is that if the observable behaviour of the brain is replicated, then consciousness will also be replicated, then the clear corollary is that consciousness can be inferred from observable behaviour.

Yes.

> Which implies that I can be as certain of the consciousness of other people as I am of my own.

No. The idea that consciousness can be inferred from intelligent behavior is an axiom of existence, it has no proof and will never have a proof but it sure seems like its true, and every sane human being uses it every hour of their waking life. And there is always a element of doubt in real life, or at least there should be, so something need not provide absolute certainty to be enormously useful. As for my own consciousness I don’t have a proof of that either but I don’t need one because I’ve got the one thing that can pull rank even over proof, direct experience.   

> This seems to do some violence to the 1p/1pp/3p distinctions 

Bruno’s the one who started pushing that ridiculous phrase, I suppose he thought it sounded more profound erudite and scientific than “the difference between you and me”. And I would maintain nobody outside a looney bin has difficulty finding the "1p/1pp/3p distinction”.

 John K Clark

[Telmo Menezes]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 5:03 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 7:06 PM, Bruce Kellett <bhke...@optusnet.com.au>
> wrote:
>>
>> > If the theory is that if the observable behaviour of the brain is
>> > replicated, then consciousness will also be replicated, then the clear
>> > corollary is that consciousness can be inferred from observable behaviour.
>
> Yes.
>>
>> > Which implies that I can be as certain of the consciousness of other
>> > people as I am of my own.
>
> No. The idea that consciousness can be inferred from intelligent behavior is
> an axiom of existence,

People commit acts of cruelty against animals with highly
sophisticated behaviors all the time.
Not to speak of slavery, and all the people already dreaming of
AI-slavery, Blade Runner style.

> it has no proof and will never have a proof but it
> sure seems like its true, and every sane human being uses it every hour of
> their waking life. And there is always a element of doubt in real life, or
> at least there should be, so something need not provide absolute certainty
> to be enormously useful. As for my own consciousness I don’t have a proof of
> that either but I don’t need one because I’ve got the one thing that can
> pull rank even over proof, direct experience.

I agree with all that you say above.

Telmo.

>>
>> > This seems to do some violence to the 1p/1pp/3p distinctions
>
> Bruno’s the one who started pushing that ridiculous phrase, I suppose he
> thought it sounded more profound erudite and scientific than “the difference
> between you and me”. And I would maintain nobody outside a looney bin has
> difficulty finding the "1p/1pp/3p distinction”.
>
> John K Clark
>
>

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[Lawrence Crowell]

My point is actually empirical. The claim is that this can be done, which means experiments will be  done. If so then we might ask, "What can go wrong with that?"

My point is that to load my brain states into a computer requires some process for measuring and cataloging the neural nets in my brain. Processes such as computing subsets of combinatorial processes are NP-complete. This will form some limit on this claim, and it could be a fundamental barrier. Duplication is not possible either, for a complete duplicate on the fine grain quantum scale involves quantum cloning that is not a quantum process. A lot of this discussion involves rubbing the philosopher's stone, when in fact this would be a whole lot more difficult to actually do.

LC

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 4:57 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:

> You cannot assume that you can infer consciousness from behavior, and that use this assumption toconclude that you can infer consciousness from behavior.

Sure you can. If I accept the premiss “consciousness can be inferred from intelligent behavior” and I see you behaving intelligently then it is 100% logical for me to conclude that you are conscious. You can say the premiss is untrue if you want but be aware that path leads to solipsism. But maybe solecism is true, I can’t disprove it, so maybe I really am the only conscious being in the universe, but it sure doesn’t feel that way to me. 

 > I am just stating the simple fact that, since there is no known instrument so far that can detect consciousness in the 3p, then it is not possible to propose scientific theories about consciousness at the moment. 

I agree with that except I’d get rid of the caveat “at the moment”. I don’t think I could ever be as certain of your consciousness as I am of my own.

> I strongly suspect that consciousness is something that cannot, in fact, be studied by science -- because consciousness is what does science. It's like asking you to look inside your eyeballs.

Or maybe its a brute fact so we can’t find out more about consciousness because after discovering consciousness is the way data feels like when it is being processed there is nothing more to discover about consciousness (not to be confused with intelligence, there is always more to discover about that). It seems likely to me that a iterated series of “why” questions does not continue for infinity but eventually terminates in a brute fact, and I suspect consciousness is one of them.

​ ​

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 12:52 PM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> My point is that to load my brain states into a computer requires some process for measuring and cataloging the neural nets in my brain. Processes such as computing subsets of combinatorial processes are NP-complete. This will form some limit on this claim, and it could be a fundamental barrier. 

If a general class of problems has been proven to be NP-complete that does not necessarily mean all instances of that problem are unsolvable, or even that most of them are, it only means some exists that are. For example, in the early days knapsack encryption competed with RSA encryption which is based on factoring, the knapsack problem has been proven to be NP-complete but factoring has not so you might think the knapsack method would be more secure than RSA, but actually the exact opposite is true. Some particular knapsack problems are devilishly hard to solve but the vast majority are far far easier. And with RSA you don’t have to factor just any old number, you’ve got to factor a particularly difficult one that is the product of two prime numbers. Today nobody uses knapsack because it is horribly insecure while RSA has become the standard.

​  ​

John K Clark

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/20/2018 3:58 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

The interesting thing is that you can draw conclusions about consciousness
without being able to define it or detect it.

I agree.

The claim is that IF an entity
is conscious THEN its consciousness will be preserved if brain function is
preserved despite changing the brain substrate.

Ok, this is computationalism. I also bet on computationalism, but I
think we must proceed with caution and not forget that we are just
assuming this to be true. Your thought experiment is convincing but is
not a proof. You do expose something that I agree with: that
non-computationalism sounds silly.

But does it sound so silly if we propose substituting a completely different kind of computer, e.g. von Neumann architecture or one that just records everything instead of an episodic associative memory, for the brain.  The Church-Turing conjecture says it can compute the same functions.  But does it instantiate the same consciousness.  My intuition is that it would be "conscious" but in some different way; for example by having the kind of memory you would have if you could review of a movie of any interval in your past.

Brent

[Mindey I.]

Well, ASC has been done at least 2 years ago, and I really thought we have to create a huge bounty to incentivize labs to reduce toxicity.

The $10bn Mouse Cryonics Prize - https://blog.mindey.com/2016/04/01/why-10bn-mouse-cryonics-prize/

Question, how to do it practically? Maybe we should ask X-Prize Foundation to go ahead with that kind of prize? (details in the link)

Mindey

On Tuesday, March 13, 2018 at 9:16:04 PM UTC, John Clark wrote:

​

Woody Allen said "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment”, well maybe there is a way. Yesterday the Large Mammal Brain Preservation Prize was awarded to 21st Century Medicine and lead company ​researcher Robert McIntyre. They used both glutaraldehyde fixation and cryogenic storage, and proved that a pig's brain connectome, that is ​the 150 trillion synaptic connections that are thought to encode memory and the whole mind, is preserved. And because it is stored at near liquid nitrogen temperatures it could be preserved for centuries. 3D pictures were made by a electron microscope after the brain was rewarmed and they showed amazing preservation, and there is no reason to think molecular-level information wouldn't be preserved too. It's even more impressive when you consider that the pictures were made after rewarming because most of the damage happens at that stage, I would have been delighted even if the pictures were made while the brain was still frozen, but this is even better. Kenneth Hayworth  a PhD in Neurosciencesaid:

"Let that sink in…  Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, if properly applied TODAY, could preserve the information content of a human brain for indefinitely-long storage."

At this point there is little doubt, Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation works and it does a much better job than the method Alcor currently uses. And at this point no new science is required we just need improved technical procedures to make it practical to use in a hospital setting and the will to do so.

There is more about this here

https://turingchurch.net/cryonics-for-uploaders-the-brain-preservation-prize-has-been-won-cebbe98c241a

And there is a really good video about this, it's 24 minutes long but anyone who is seriously interested in immortality needs to watch it:  

​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejIKy5R4uGM

John K Clark

[Stathis Papaioannou]

I think it would be conscious in the same way if you replaced neural tissue with a black box that interacted with the surrounding tissue in the same way. It doesn’t matter what is in the black box; it could even work by magic.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Brent Meeker]

That's one possible way.  But another would be to simply create artificial neurons with the same connectivity...the 3D analog of copying a map with a Xerox copier...no measuring and cataloging needed.  It might someday be possible using a kind of 3D printer working from high-resolution MRIs of your brain.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 3:56 PM, Mindey I. <min...@mindey.com> wrote:

>

​ 

Well, ASC has been done at least 2 years ago, and I really thought we have to create a huge bounty to incentivize labs to reduce toxicity.

You want to be able to "freezes a mouse brain, keeps it under cryogenic temperature (below −180°C) for 24 hours, and then brings back the mouse to life​", well I'd like that too but I think that's far too ​ambitious to be practical, in fact I don't think that will happen until full scale Drexler style nanotechnology is developed, and at that point all forms of Cryonics will become obsolete because aging and all forms of disease would be easily curable. And rather than using valuable resources to find ways to reduce toxicity I think it would be wiser to find ways to increase what Michael Perry of Alcor calls inferability,  that is the ability to figure out what part went where before the freezing was done.

By the way, you don't need to go all the way down to -180 C, -130 C is plenty cold enough for long term storage, in fact it would be slightly better. If you go colder than -130 C the brain develops cracks, but that

​'s​

not a big deal because its easy to infer where things were before the crack happened. Its cheaper and more reliable to just use liquid nitrogen so that's why Alcor stores brains at -196 C.

 John K Clark

[Brent Meeker]

Then why draw the line at "surrounding tissue".  Why not the external enivironment? 

Are you saying you can't imagine being "conscious" but in a different way?

Brent

[Bruce Kellett]

From: Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 1:03 AM, Bruce Kellett

<bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> Now it may be that you want to reject Stathis's claim, and insist that

> consciousness cannot be inferred from behaviour. But it seems to me that
> that theory is as lacking in independent verification as the contrary.

Again, no theory. I am just stating the simple fact that, since there
is no known instrument so far that can detect consciousness in the 3p,
then it is not possible to propose scientific theories about
consciousness at the moment. Only conjectures.

Explain the difference between a scientific theory and a scientific conjecture. Science is not about proofs; theories are always only ever conjectural, and subject to revision and/or rejection as further evidence is gathered. You don't need an instrument that can give a clean yes/no answer to the presence of consciousness to develop scientific theories about consciousness. We can start with the observation that all normal healthy humans are conscious, and that rocks and other inert objects are not conscious and work from there to develop a science of consciousness, based on evidence from the observation of behaviour. One might well consider that there are different levels or types of consciousness accorded to humans, animals, octopuses, and so on. But that would be a scientific finding, based on observational evidence.

So science is not as limited as you seem to want to make it -- science is not mathematics, after all.

If you want my conjecture: I assume that all living things are
conscious. If you show me an AI that behaves like a human being (or
even a dog) I will assume it's conscious too. But none of this is
science.

I strongly suspect that consciousness is something that cannot, in
fact, be studied by science -- because consciousness is what does
science. It's like asking you to look inside your eyeballs.

 It is perfectly possible to look inside one's own eyeballs. Have you never been to an optician? Just use a mirror with his instruments for inspecting and recording the state of the retina.

Bruce

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/20/2018 4:27 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:

From: Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 1:03 AM, Bruce Kellett

<bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> Now it may be that you want to reject Stathis's claim, and insist that
> consciousness cannot be inferred from behaviour. But it seems to me that
> that theory is as lacking in independent verification as the contrary.

Again, no theory. I am just stating the simple fact that, since there
is no known instrument so far that can detect consciousness in the 3p,
then it is not possible to propose scientific theories about
consciousness at the moment. Only conjectures.

Explain the difference between a scientific theory and a scientific conjecture. Science is not about proofs; theories are always only ever conjectural, and subject to revision and/or rejection as further evidence is gathered. You don't need an instrument that can give a clean yes/no answer to the presence of consciousness to develop scientific theories about consciousness. We can start with the observation that all normal healthy humans are conscious, and that rocks and other inert objects are not conscious and work from there to develop a science of consciousness, based on evidence from the observation of behaviour. One might well consider that there are different levels or types of consciousness accorded to humans, animals, octopuses, and so on. But that would be a scientific finding, based on observational evidence.

And not just based on observed behavior but also on the details of internal information processing.  One of the reasons for supposing that octopus consciousness is different from human consciousness is that an octopus does a lot of information processing in its tentacles.

Brent

So science is not as limited as you seem to want to make it -- science is not mathematics, after all.

If you want my conjecture: I assume that all living things are
conscious. If you show me an AI that behaves like a human being (or
even a dog) I will assume it's conscious too. But none of this is
science.

I strongly suspect that consciousness is something that cannot, in
fact, be studied by science -- because consciousness is what does
science. It's like asking you to look inside your eyeballs.

 It is perfectly possible to look inside one's own eyeballs. Have you never been to an optician? Just use a mirror with his instruments for inspecting and recording the state of the retina.

Bruce

[Bruce Kellett]

From: Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com>

On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 at 10:09 am, Bruce Kellett <bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

If the theory is that if the observable behaviour of the brain is replicated, then consciousness will also be replicated, then the clear corollary is that consciousness can be inferred from observable behaviour. Which implies that I can be as certain of the consciousness of other people as I am of my own. This seems to do some violence to the 1p/1pp/3p distinctions that computationalism rely on so much: only 1p is "certainly certain". But if I can reliably infer consciousness in others, then other things can be as certain as 1p experiences....

You can’t reliable infer consciousness in others. What you can infer is that whatever consciousness an entity has, it will be preserved if functionally identical substitutions in its brain are made.

You have that backwards. You can infer consciousness in others, by observing their behaviour. The alternative would be solipsism. Now, while you can't prove or disprove solipsism in a mathematical sense, you can reject solipsism as a useless theory, since it tells you nothing about anything. Whereas science acts on the available evidence -- observations of behaviour in this case.

But we have no evidence that consciousness would be preserved under functionally identical substitutions in the brain. Consciousness may be a global affair, so functionally equivalence may not be achievable, or even definable, within the context of a conscious brain. Can you map the functionality of even a single neuron? You are assuming that you can, but if that function is global, then you probably can't. There is a fair amount of glibness in your assumption that consciousness will be preserved under such substitutions.

You can’t know if a mouse is conscious, but you can know that if mouse neurones are replaced with functionally identical electronic neurones its behaviour will be the same and any consciousness it may have will also be the same.

You cannot know this without actually doing the substitution and observing the results.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Kellett <bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

​>​

You don't need an instrument that can give a clean yes/no answer to the presence of consciousness to develop scientific theories about consciousness. We can start with the observation that all normal healthy humans are conscious, and that rocks and other inert objects are not conscious and work from there to develop a science of consciousness, based on evidence from the observation of behaviour.

But if it was all based on the observation of behavior then what you'd end up with is a scientific theory about intelligence not consciousness.

​ ​

John K Clark
 

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 7:40 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

One of the reasons for supposing that octopus consciousness is different from human consciousness is that an octopus does a lot of information processing in its tentacles.

And some humans live in England and so do their information processing

​ 

there while others do it in the USA. Why is the location of the processor important specifically to consciousness and not intelligence? I don't see the connection, in principle you might not even consciously know where your data is being processed, you only know where your sense organs are

​

.

 

​ ​

John k Clark

[Bruce Kellett]

From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Kellett <bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

 

​> ​

You don't need an instrument that can give a clean yes/no answer to the presence of consciousness to develop scientific theories about consciousness. We can start with the observation that all normal healthy humans are conscious, and that rocks and other inert objects are not conscious and work from there to develop a science of consciousness, based on evidence from the observation of behaviour.

But if it was all based on the observation of behavior then what you'd end up with is a scientific theory about intelligence not consciousness.

Not all behaviour is intelligent, just as not all behaviour is necessarily conscious. You would have to learn to tell the difference.

Bruce

​ ​

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 8:47 PM, Bruce Kellett <bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

Not all behaviour is intelligent,

 I know. A rock rolling down a hill that is not evidence of intelligent behavior.

​

 

​> ​

just as not all behaviour is necessarily conscious.

 

I know. That's why I don't think rocks are conscious.

  

​> ​

You would have to learn to tell the difference.

  

If you know of a way to do that other than by observing intelligent behavior I'd love to hear all about it.

​ 

 John K Clark​

[Brent Meeker]

But then add in the observation that your consciousness and your behavior are strongly correlated and you have a theory about consciousness and intelligence.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/20/2018 5:49 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 7:40 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

One of the reasons for supposing that octopus consciousness is different from human consciousness is that an octopus does a lot of information processing in its tentacles.

And some humans live in England and so do their information processing

​ 

there while others do it in the USA. Why is the location of the processor important specifically to consciousness and not intelligence?

Did I say it was not important to intelligence?  You seem to read a lot that isn't written.  The location is important because the tentacles behave intelligently even when cut off.  So the intelligence, and hence the consciousness, is distributed. 

Brent

I don't see the connection, in principle you might not even consciously know where your data is being processed, you only know where your sense organs are

​

.

 

​ ​

John k Clark

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 9:17 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

​> ​

So the intelligence, and hence the consciousness, is distributed. 

How is that relevant? A mind might not consciously know if its data was being processed distributively or not and have no why to deduce that fact no matter intelligent it is unless it had additional information from its sense organs. If a mind (not to be confused with a brain) can be said to have a position at all it would be the place it is thinking about, which is usually the place the sense organs are observing. Due to human anatomy the sense organs and the place the data is processed are in almost the same place but that need not be true for mind in general. 

​John K Clark​

 

[Brent Meeker]

You are implicitly assuming a unity of mind which it might not have. 

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Mar 2018, at 10:58, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, March 18, 2018 at 8:46:26 PM UTC-6, stathisp wrote:

On 19 March 2018 at 12:14, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, March 18, 2018 at 3:51:13 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:02 AM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The MH spacetimes have Cauchy horizons that because they pile up geodesics can be a sort of singularity.

That’s not the only thing they have, MH spacetimes also have closed timelike curves and logical paradoxes produced by them, one of them being the one found by Turing. They also have naked singularities that nobody has ever seen the slightest hint of. And if you need to go to as exotic a place as the speculative interior of a Black Hole to find a reason why Cryonics might not work I am greatly encouraged. 

Not all MH spaces have closed timelike curves.

 

> The subject of NP-completeness came up because of my conjecture about there being a sort of code associated with a conscious entity that is not computable or if computable is intractable in NP. 

NP-completeness is sorta weird and consciousness is sorta weird, but other than that is there any reason to think the two things are related?

This seems to be something you are not registering. Classic NP-complete problems involve cataloging subgraphs and determining the rules for all subgraphs in a graph. There are other similar combinatoric problems that are NP complete. A map from a brain to a computer is going to require knowing how to handle these problems. Quantum computers do not help much.

 

> It could have some bearing on the ability to emulate consciousness in a computer.

How do you figure that? Both my brain and my computer are made of matter that obeys the laws of physics, and matter that obeys the laws of physics has never been observed to compute NP-complete problems in polynomial time, much less less find the answer to a non-computable question, like “what is the 7918th Busy Beaver number?”.

And for this reason it could be impossible to map brain states into a computer and capture a person completely. Of course brains and computers are made of matter.

Physical brains and physical computer are made of matter, but matter is only an appearance for the computer and brain which are emulated by the number relations.

Many here seems to believe in Aristotle primary matter, which I can explain to be logically incompatible with (Digital) Mechanism. You can’t have both some primary matter playing a role in consciousness and Digital Mechanism.

And there has never been the slightest evidence for the existence of primary matter. On the contrary contemporary physics seems to confirms, intuitively and formally the immaterialist consequences of Digital Mechanism. The quantum is only the digital seen from inside, or from the self-referential mode of the numbers (the hypostases []p & ~[]f, or even []p & p on p sigma_1 (= semi-computable).

With mechanism, consciousness is far easier to explain than matter. Consciousness is only the truth when it intersect the belief in a reality. That makes it true, undoubtable (and thus known), but also non-justifiable, nor definable. All universal numbers have it, and the computations does not create it. The computation’s role is only in channeling the differentiation of the consciousness attached to the universal entities.

NP completeness is a red herring here. The busy beaver function is just an exemple of a non computable (yet universal) functions. There are tuns of other non computable function, like basically all attribute of (universal or not) digital machines.

Bruno

PS heavy teaching period, sorry for the delays.

So is a pile of shit also made of matter. Based on what we know about bacteria and their network communicating by electrical potentials the pile of shit may have more in the way of consciousness than a computer. 

As for the rest I think a lot of this sort of idea is chasing after some crazy dream. There is in some ways a problem with doing that. As things stand now I would not do the upload.  Below is a picture of some aspect of this. 

Could you say if you think the observable behaviour of the brain (and hence of the person whose muscles are controlled by the brain) could be replaced by a computer, and, if the answer is yes, if you still think it is possible that the consciousness might not be preserved? And if the answer is also yes to the second question, what you think it would be like if your consciousness was changed by replacing part of your brain, but your brain still forced your body to behave in the same way?

--

Stathis Papaioannou

I really do not know. I will say if it is possible in principle to replace the executive parts of the brain with a computer, but where the result could be a sort of zombie. There are too many unknowns and unknowns with no Bayesian priors, or unknown unknowns. We are in a domain of possibles, plausibles and maybe a Jupiter computer-brain. There is so little to go with this, and to be honest a lot more possible obstructions I might see than realities, that almost nothing can be said with much certainty.

LC

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 19 Mar 2018, at 13:01, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 9:29 PM, Lawrence Crowell
> <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sunday, March 18, 2018 at 10:34:17 AM UTC-6, telmo_menezes wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 5:18 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:16 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Evolution produced me. I know with 100% certainty that I am
>>>>>>>> conscious. I very strongly suspect billions of other things are
>>>>>>>> conscious
>>>>>>>> too. I know for a fact Evolution can detect intelligent behavior
>>>>>>>> but it
>>>>>>>> can’t detect consciousness and yet I am consciousness. Therefor
>>>>>>>> consciousness MUST be a byproduct intelligence. Evolution says as
>>>>>>>> much about
>>>>>>>> consciousness as there is to say, it is the best purely logical
>>>>>>>> argument
>>>>>>>> against solipsism, in fact it is the only one, all the others are
>>>>>>>> just
>>>>>>>> variations of “my initiation says its untrue” or “solipsism is too
>>>>>>>> strange
>>>>>>>> to be true”.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> This assumes that if evolution produced X, then any property of X is
>>>>>> also a product of evolution.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Not any property
>>>> of
>>>> X, just any property the parts of X didn't have before Evolution
>>>> started
>>>> its work. You walk into a bakery and see a cake and you assume the baker
>>>> made the cake. Do you also assume the baker made the flower in the cake,
>>>> and
>>>> the carbon in the flower, and the protons in the carbon, and the quarks
>>>> in
>>>> the protons?
>>>
>>> No, because the cake is an improbable thing, while protons are
>>> probable things. I don't know how probable consciousness is. As you
>>> said, I cannot detect it.
>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> It is trivially not the case. For example, you have mass and an
>>>>>> electromagnetic field and a temperature, and yet neither mass nor
>>>>>> electromagnetism nor temperature are products
>>>>> of evolution.
>>>>
>>>> I know Evolution produced my physical brain and I know with 100%
>>>> certainty
>>>> my brain is conscious,
>>>
>>> But you don't know what else is conscious.
>>>
>>>> however I do not know with 100% certainty that mass
>>>> or electromagnetism or temperature are conscious, in fact I rather
>>>> suspect
>>>> they are not and there is only one reason I have that suspicion, they do
>>>> not
>>>> behave intelligently.
>>>
>>> Intelligent behavior is relative to humans. It just means that you are
>>> good at the things that are necessary to succeed in a specific
>>> evolutionary niche that the Lovecraftian-horror a.k.a. nature
>>> produced. It also produced myriad other things.
>>>
>>> Humans are terribly complex, and it might be that consciousness arises
>>> from terribly complex things, or from certain types of terribly
>>> complex things. But I don't really know and neither do you.
>>>
>>> Telmo.
>>
>>
>> In a part what you say is spot on. The problem with consciousness is there
>> is a lot more ignorance about it than much in the way of certain knowledge.
>> It may be a sort of epiphenomenon that emerges from some class of complex
>> systems, which at this time we do know understand. Roger Penrose thinks it
>> is something is a triality of physics, mathematics and mind, which is a sort
>> of Platonic look. Dennett on the other hand thinks consciousness is a sort
>> of illusion, which is a sort of epiphenomenon. Dennett calls it a
>> hetererophenomenon as it involves a sort of game of multiple drafts. We
>> really do not know for sure what consciousness is.
>
> I am on the Platonist camp, but fully realize that this is a personal
> bet / intuition. I agree with Bruno that if computationalism is true,
> then consciousness cannot be an epiphenomenon. But we don't know if
> computationalism is true.
>
> Dennett I just find just silly. I think he plays with words, and
> accepting his arguments would force me to deny something (the only
> thing) that I absolutely know to be true.
>
>> I can think of things that strike me as obstructions to the idea of
>> uploading brain states to a computer. The issue of NP-completeness seems
>> plausible, and classic NP-complete problems are combinatorial systems which
>> the brain is an example of. Other questions seem to make this problematic.
>> It does seem to me the barrier of ignorance is far higher than our ability
>> to vault over it.
>
> Agreed. I'm not sure we will ever be able to understand consciousness
> -- there is really no reason to assume that this is possible.

I am not sure why you say this. Maybe you still believe in a material universe? This still makes only matter incomprehensible. Consciousness is, fundamentally just knowledge, or true personal first person belief.



> If it
> is, I bet that it will require a quantitative jump in our
> understanding of reality.

A jump back to the neopythagorean or neoplatonist theology. A jump back to 1500 years ago.



> I most definitely do not believe that it can
> be solved by incrementalist research in neuroscience.


Yes, that would be like trying to understand how deep blue win a chess game by looking at the electronic of the universal machine running it: that will not work.

Bruno



>
> Telmo.

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 19 Mar 2018, at 13:13, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:38 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 12:34 PM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>>>> You walk into a bakery and see a cake and you assume the baker made
>>>>>> the cake. Do you also assume the baker made the flower in the cake, and the
>>>>>> carbon in the flower, and the protons in the carbon, and the quarks in the
>>>>>> protons?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> No, because the cake is an improbable thing, while protons are probable
>>>> things. I don't know how probable consciousness is.
>>
>>

>> But I do know that the bakers brain is far more improbable than a cake
>> ,
>> and mass and an electromagnetic field and temperature are even more probable
>> than protons, so why do you demand Evolution produce mass and temperature
>> and electromagnetic fields but
>> you
>> don't demand the baker produce protons?
>
> I demand no such thing. On the contrary, I am pointing out that just
> because you have a certain property, it doesn't follow that this
> property was created be evolution. Evolution is a theory about the
> complexification of biological systems. Nothing more, nothing less.

>
>>>> I don't know how probable consciousness is.
>>
>>

>> But I can make a educated guess because I know that most things don't behave
>> intelagently and I also know that when I become less conscious I also become
>> less intelligent.
>>
>>>> Humans are terribly complex
>>
>>
>> Yes, and evolution didn't bother to put in all that complexity because its a
>> nice guy and figured we'd like consciousness, it did it because intelligent
>> behavior has survival value.
>
> Human-like intelligent behavior is a successful strategy in a very
> narrow evolutionary niche. We are one thermonuclear war away from
> nature "deciding" that human-like intelligence is not so useful after
> all. Evolution is constant adaptation to the environment, with some
> self-referenciality because the things evolved become part of, and
> change the environment.

>
>>>> and it might be that consciousness arises from terribly complex things,
>>>> or from certain types of terribly complex things. But I don't really know
>>>> and neither do you.
>>
>>

>> I don't really know that human cadavers are not conscious, but they
>> sure
>> don't behave intelligently so my hunch is they are not.
>> W
>> hat is your hunch?
>
> My hunch is that I am mind in a universe made of mind. I believe
> modern physics is both valid and useful (and a lot of fun), but I do
> not know that it studies fundamental reality and I believe nobody else
> knows either.

May be you ask to much. In science we never “know” anything for sure. We know only in the theatetus’ sense, that is sometimes our beliefs are true, but only God knows that …

The universe can be said made of mind, but “made of” is still a physicalist way to talk. It is simpler: the universe is dreamed by numbers, or more exactly is the first person statistics on all computations going through our state. I found the quantum (even quantum computation) from this before I discovered that Everett quantum mechanism (QM without collapse) confirms this way of considering the physical reality (with histories in place of “worlds”, which is a term never defined by physicists, who are still mostly Aristotelian).

Best,

Bruno

PS Hmm… I have to go already.




>
> Telmo.
>
>> John K
>> Clark

[Stathis Papaioannou]

Keep expanding the part that is replaced and you replace the whole brain and the whole organism.

Are you saying you can't imagine being "conscious" but in a different way?

I think it is possible but I don’t think it could happen if my neurones were replaced by a functionally equivalent component. If it’s functionally equivalent, my behaviour would be unchanged, so I would have to communicate that my consciousness had not changed. If, in fact, my consciousness had changed, this means either I would not have noticed, in which case the idea of consciousness loses meaning, or I would have noticed but been unable to communicate it, from which point on my consciousness and my behaviour would become decoupled, implying a type of substance dualism.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 10:25 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

​>> ​

 A mind might not consciously know if its data was being processed distributively or not and have no why to deduce that fact no matter intelligent it is unless it had additional information from its sense organs. If a mind (not to be confused with a brain) can be said to have a position at all it would be the place it is thinking about, which is usually the place the sense organs are observing. Due to human anatomy the sense organs and the place the data is processed are in almost the same place but that need not be true for mind in general. 

​>​

You are implicitly assuming a unity of mind which it might not have. 

 

Assume it? I don't even know what "unity of mind" means. I assume nothing, I observe that a mind has no way of determining its position without input information from sense organs and therefore its problematic to say a mind occupies a unique position in space at all.

 ​John K Clark​

  ​

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Mar 2018, at 00:56, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

On 3/19/2018 2:19 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 10:03 PM, Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote

> octopuses are fairly intelligent but their neural structure is distributed very differently from mammals of similar intelligence.  An artificial intelligence that was not modeled on mammalian brain structure might be intelligent but not conscious

Maybe maybe maybe.

​A​

nd you don't have have the exact same brain structure as I have so you might be intelligent but not conscious. I said it before I'll say it again, consciousness theories are useless, and not just the ones on this list, all of them.

You're the one who floated a theory of consciousness based on evolution.  I'm just pointing out that it only shows that consciousness exists in humans for some evolutionarily selected purpose.  It doesn't apply to intelligence that arises in some other evolutionary branch or intelligence like AI that doesn't evolve but is designed.

Not sure that there is a genuine difference between design and evolution. With the multicellular, there is an evolution of design. With the origin of life, there has been a design of evolution, even if serendipitously. I am not talking about some purposeful or intelligent design here. A cell is a quite sophisticated "gigantic nano-machine”.

Then some technic in AI, like the genetic algorithm, or some technic inspired by the study of the immune system, or self-reference, leads to programs or machines evolving in some ways.

Now, I can argue that for consciousness nothing of this is needed. It is the canonical knowledge associated with the fixed point of the embedding of the universal machines in the arithmetical reality.

It differentiates into the many indexical first person scenarii.

Matter should be what gives rise to possibilities ([]p & ~[]f, []p & <>t).  That works as it is confirmed by QM without collapse, both intuitively through the many computations, and formally as the three material modes do provide a formal quantum logic, its arithmetical interpretation, and its metamathematical interpretations. 

The universal machine rich enough to prove their own universality (like the sound humans and Peano arithmetic, and ZF, …) are confronted to the distinction between knowing and proof. They prove their own incompleteness but still figure out some truth despite being non provable. 

The only mystery is where does the numbers (and/or the combinators, the lambda expressions, the game of life, c++, etc.) come from?

But here the sound löbian machine can prove that it is impossible to derive a universal system from a non-universal theory. 

A weaker version of the Church-Turing-Post-Kleene thesis is: It exists a Universal Machine. That is, a Machine which computes all computable functions. The stronger usual version is that some formal system/definition provides such a universal machine, meaning that the class of the functions computable by some universal machine gives the class of all computable functions, including those not everywhere defined (and non algorithmically spared among those defined everywhere: the price of universality). 

That universal being has a rich theology, explaining the relation between believing, knowing, observing, feeling and the truth.

Bruno

Brent