Karl Pribram and the four letter words

Paul Werbos

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Dec 13, 2017, 10:25:17 AM12/13/17

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Several people on this list have reminded me offline of just how lucky I was to have extensive contact for many years with Karl Pribram, one of the greatest neuropsychologists ever, who would claim some credit even for the creation of that field. In discussions of the soul, he once said to me... he had to be very careful about what he would say to the community. Unlike Minsky, he had a lot of courage that way, but after becoming one of the leaders of the "mysterians" (who argued against Dennett's very popular view of consciousness), he once told me: "I need to be very careful about words like 'soul.' I have already lost a lot of the traction I had with this community with the modest steps I have already taken, and am taking, to push them more towards enlightenment."

Pribram's deep effort disentangle and explain Freud's theory of psychodynamics in detail, with Gill, was published by basic books, but does not get the attention and analysis it deserves. I wonder whether scanning and biorXiv would be possible? I do not even know who inherited the rights to that book after he died, just a few years ago.

A key aspect of sanity or zhengqi, a prerequisite to the more ambitious states people here rightly aspire to reach eventually, is better more complete integration of the mundane brain/mind, connecting the symbolic reasoning part and the "mouse within." We need not BECOME mice, but we need to be able to see the mouse in the mirror and talk with it, in order to keep it in balance while we... also build higher. To understand the mundane mind, and exploit everything Karl learned from Freud (more than I ever did), we really need to respect four letter words.

How could that possibly be relevant to our discussions🙂? When Karl told me his views about this, I remembered The Art of Readable Writing, by Flesch, which my father highly recommended, but no time this morning for more detail (though it deserves more detail).

No one understands human consciousness, he would say, and no one is in touch with themselves, unless they fully understood and respected the "four f's." (For the Celtic fans here... I always remember an odd pronunciation of the word "food" which reminds me of those bags for horses, as in "shod.") As we study the evolution of human languages, we see of course a SHannon principle at work, where the concepts most basic to a culture get short words. In later years, I was amused... "soul" is a four letter word. "sex", "God," "dog" and "cat" (and "fed" and sun and son) are even sorter. Qi is even better. But what of "id" and "ego"?

We need not become primitive in order to fully appreciate our primitive roots, and we can see them more clearly with mathematics, not words at all.

But I must run. Best of luck,

Paul

University of Ireland

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Dec 18, 2017, 1:00:48 PM12/18/17

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Rather uniquely, I worked on implementing the neurodynamics of Probram
and Freeman with both of them.

Karl spent a week in my lab in Dublin in 1999 - well, ok, he took
tours around the city with me and my students, perhaps a better way of
getting him to share his wisdom!. So we are the only group to
implement his theory computationally while he was alive

We interrelated it with his colleague David Bohm's work which is
holographic as distinct from Karl's holonomic approach.

It is published in the 2016 Fom collection;

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/dualism-platonism-and-voluntarism

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O Nuallain & Doris corrected.doc

Syamala Hari

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Dec 18, 2017, 4:12:35 PM12/18/17

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In my opinion, the theories of consciousness of both Bohm and Pribram have problems.

In his dual-aspect theory, Bohm associates consciousness with an infinite sequence of quantum potentials at successive levels, each acting upon, or organizing( "putting form into" in Bohm's words), the one below. Bohm’s collaborators, Hiley and Pylkkanen claim that their theory avoids dualism without falling into reductive materialism because a particle and its wavefunction on whose shape the quantum potential depends, are two different aspects of just one reality. If so, why is mind not present in any lifeless quantum system although the system has its own infinite progressions of quantum potential and superquantum potentials (SQP)? Why is content if inseparable from form, absent in these SQPs? Saying that the psyche is rudimentary at the lowest level, i.e., that of manifest matter is not an answer. What about its higher level SQPs? they exist in a lifeless quantum system also.

Moreover, the quantum potential guides the motion of the particle but the particle has no impact on the quantum potential. So, from the Bohm-Hiley hypothesis (that the mind is nothing but a collection of quantum potentials at various levels), one can infer that mind acts on the brain but how does this hypothesis explain that the brain acts on the mind? Bohm's coworkers Hiley and Pylkkannen added as if by hand, the notion of action in the reverse direction, namely that of action by a quantum potential or an SQP on its higher level SQP. In the paper, Naturalizing the Mind in a Quantum Framework, in the book Dimensions of Conscious experience, they say "In a reverse process, the state of the more manifest matter can via the hierarchy of quantum potential fields, influence the information content we experience.” But there is no the quantum framework for it.

Pribram on the other hand often points out that the medium is not the message and therefore agrees with the concept of JZ Young (another neuroscientist) that information is stored or communicated using physical entities, such as books or sound waves or brains, but that information itself is not material.

But Pribram thinks that communication is mental. Is it? If a pattern of bits stored in a computer is not a message unless we assign some meaning to the pattern, why would a pattern of electrical signals passing through a telephone line be a message with meaning, when we have not yet assigned a meaning to it?

The point is: the psychological part of the communication process happens only in the listener’s brain but not anywhere outside. So, all communication is not mental. Actually, in the brain or in Pribram's context, both physical and mental communication exists among cortical dendritic architectures. Scientists can observe and measure only the physical communication mechanisms. All measured quantities are just as physical or chemical as properties of any lifeless physical system outside the brain. In the brain, we regard them as indicative of mental aspects and associate them with mental aspects based on what the person subjected to an experiment tells the experimenter, or does not if in an unconscious state.

Pribram claims “Gabor function provides a good description of the architecture of activity in cortical dendritic fields to sensory stimulation. Thus, the same mathematical formulation describes an elementary psychological process, communication, and an elementary material process in the brain. The Gabor quantum of information can, therefore, serve the same function for the wetware/minding relationship that the bit serves for the hardware/software relation.” It is true that the bit in a digital computer or the qubit in a quantum computer are both software elements and they are both mapped to hardware units in the respective computers but they are not the same as their meaning in the programmer’s head. Similarly, in the brain, the Gabor quantum of information is associated with an elementary wetware process; the brain itself associates a psychological process to this wetware process unlike in a computer, where the programmer assigns meaning to the bit/qubit. Still, that does not necessarily mean that the elementary wetware process is the same as an elementary psychological process. Because for example, in the design of an optical hologram, Gabor function describes a material process but it does not describe any psychological process and there is none.

Syamala

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Whit Blauvelt

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Dec 18, 2017, 8:10:05 PM12/18/17

to 'Syamala Hari' via Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D.

On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 07:28:38PM +0000, 'Syamala Hari' via Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. wrote:

> But Pribram thinks that communication is mental. Is it? If a pattern of bits
> stored in a computer is not a message unless we assign some meaning to the
> pattern, why would a pattern of electrical signals passing through a telephone
> line be a message with meaning, when we have not yet assigned a meaning to it?

Hi Syamala,

Please explain the problem here, as it doesn't register with me from those
sentences. When there is a message with meaning in a telephone wire, the
meaning was assigned by the person who voiced the message, and the meaning
is retrived by the person hearing the signals when translated back to a
voice analog. There is no meaning in the signals in between the assignment
and retrieval, beyond their having the potential to have meaning retrieved,
if the reception is just right.

When and if the meaning is retrieved, it is retrieved ultimately from the
person who spoke at the other end. There is no meaning in the signals aside
from that. There is no meaning to the signals that isn't derived from the
speaker, as reconstituted by the listener. The wire adds no meaning, because
it has none to add.

Then again, "meaning" may be a vague word. If the "listener" is a robot
which can obey commands like "turn right," then in a sense the "meaning" of
"turn right" is for the robot to turn right. But in the sense I think we're
concerned with here, turning right has no meaning for the robot. It has a
meaningless existence, except insofar as the robot and its actions mean
something to conscious beings which share its environment.

Best,
Whit

Syamala Hari

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Dec 19, 2017, 3:30:18 PM12/19/17

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High Whit,

Well, one can use the word 'meaning' with the meaning you suggested also. I did not mean it the way you suggested. While working with computers/robots, we frequently use the phrases: "It knows", "it understands", etc. There is a difference between a human being's knowing and understanding and a robot's "knowing" and "understanding" is it not? In fact, if you tell your dog to fetch a ball, the dog understands what you said and fetches the ball. The robot will also do the same and you may say the robot "understands" your instruction but its "understanding" is certainly different from a human being's or even the dog's "understanding" of your instruction.

In the case of the robot, the "turn right" instruction is a material process: giving it energy or momentum to initiate action followed by action according to instructions already coded into its hardware. Turnig right or fetching the ball is a completely material process in which the robot ha no conscious experience of anything. The content of a conscious experience or what a conscious being is aware of in an experience is what I called meaning in my post. We have different experiences. Seeing an apple and eating it. What we aware of in the two experiences is what I call the meanings of those actions, the actions themselves being material processes. This meaning is NOT matter or the material process which exist in both the human being (or dog) and in the robot. More simply, the meaning of a word is not the same as the word, or the sound we make when uttering the word because the same meaning can be conveyed by different words in different languages.

Pribram found an accurate description in terms of Gabor functions, of the brain's material/physical memory which stores our experiences. Then he says that the Gabor function describes both the brain's physical memory and the psychological content also. What I say is that the gabor function is like a comuter's bit or qubit and different from the concept (psychological) concept. So his theory still does not solve the hard problem.

Best

Syamala

From: Whit Blauvelt <wh...@csmind.com>
To: "'Syamala Hari' via Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D." <Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2017 8:08 PM

Subject: Re: [Sadhu Sanga] Karl Pribram and the four letter words

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Bruno Marchal

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Dec 20, 2017, 8:38:43 AM12/20/17

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On 19 Dec 2017, at 16:19, 'Syamala Hari' via Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. wrote:

High Whit,
Well, one can use the word 'meaning' with the meaning you suggested also. I did not mean it the way you suggested. While working with computers/robots, we frequently use the phrases: "It knows", "it understands", etc. There is a difference between a human being's knowing and understanding and a robot's "knowing" and "understanding" is it not? In fact, if you tell your dog to fetch a ball, the dog understands what you said and fetches the ball. The robot will also do the same and you may say the robot "understands" your instruction but its "understanding" is certainly different from a human being's or even the dog's "understanding" of your instruction.

How do you know that?

I think you can say that if the robot is an automata. In that case, it is controlable, always defined, etc. But that intuition can be shown not available for a computer or any universal machine (in arithmetic). After Turing)Gödel's work, we know that we know about nothing on what the universal machine are capable and not capable.

On the contrary, we know that such machine have a rich theology, and that such a theology contains, in its sharable probable parts, the whole of(public) physics, making that theory testable. And the test done up to now, confirms Mechanism (and thus suggests that weak materialism, physicalism, etc. are wrong).

In the case of the robot, the "turn right" instruction is a material process: giving it energy or momentum to initiate action followed by action according to instructions already coded into its hardware. Turnig right or fetching the ball is a completely material process in which the robot ha no conscious experience of anything. The content of a conscious experience or what a conscious being is aware of in an experience is what I called meaning in my post. We have different experiences. Seeing an apple and eating it. What we aware of in the two experiences is what I call the meanings of those actions, the actions themselves being material processes. This meaning is NOT matter or the material process which exist in both the human being (or dog) and in the robot.

Locally. But eventually, "matter" is only a meaningfull idea in the mind of the machine or the numbers. the solution of the mind-body problem already provided by the machine in arithmetic, is that "matter" does not exist, like in Plotinus and other rational mystic.

More simply, the meaning of a word is not the same as the word, or the sound we make when uttering the word because the same meaning can be conveyed by different words in different languages.

OK. Like a mind can be conveyed by different bodies or different representations in arithmetic.

Pribram found an accurate description in terms of Gabor functions, of the brain's material/physical memory which stores our experiences. Then he says that the Gabor function describes both the brain's physical memory and the psychological content also. What I say is that the gabor function is like a comuter's bit or qubit and different from the concept (psychological) concept. So his theory still does not solve the hard problem.

Even without mechanism, I think it is better when we do science, especially in metaphysics, to not invoke metaphysical notion, like primairy matter, in an explanation.

Many people confuse the evidence for a physical reality with evidence for physicalism or weak-materialism (the belief in primitive matter), but as the antic dream argument already has refuted, there is no evidence for any ontology (except personal consciousness), and with mechanism, it becomes invalid to assume anything more than numbers or similar inductive structures and laws.

Mechanism solves the hard problem of consciousness, in the sense that it explains why any universal machine introspecting itself get aware of something non-doubtable, true, and not justifiable rationally, concerning them. The machine already knows that they have a soul, and that the soul is not a machine. The hard problem is reduced in explaining physics from machine self-reference. They have a theology which includes physics, and so is testable, and it works until now.

Best,

Bruno

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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Syamala Hari

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Dec 22, 2017, 6:56:06 AM12/22/17

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Hi Bruno,

You say "How do you know that?" (implying how do I know that a robot's understanding is different from that of a human being's understanding). I expected that someone would ask that question and you did.

When a robot behaves as if it 'knows' or 'understands' something, it is able to exhibit the behavior, for example, turns right if it is given the instruction to turn right, because what is 'right' what is 'left' etc. are all coded into the robot's hardware. The robot's 'knowing/understanding' of 'right' is the same as having a record/representation of 'right' in its hardware. Afterwards, if you ask the robot, did you turn right or left, the robot would say that it turned right. It never lies and it is incapable of lying and it strictly implements the stored instructions. If the robot does not obey the instruction, the programmer/engineer can check both hardware and software and see what was wrong in its memory or what it 'knew' or 'understood' earlier and fix it. In other words, the engineer can access its 'knowledge'. On the other hand, a human being is capable of lying and has a great temptation to lie especially when he/she does an act while nobody else is watching, if the act is generally not approved by others. The reason for this temptation is that only the one who did the act, has the exact 'knowledge' of that act; nobody else can directly access it. So all the 'knowledge' of a robot is accessible to others. The 'knowledge' of a human being is not. Others have to depend upon what the former reports.

Although animals do not lie, their experience is also not directly accessible to others. That is what the theme of Nagel's paper "what it is to be like a bat".

Syamala

From: Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>
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Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2017 8:37 AM

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Paul Werbos

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Dec 22, 2017, 1:15:45 PM12/22/17

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Perhaps it would be best if the very different threads of conversation here could be separated by different subject lines, for the sake of those who have strong interests in one thread but not in another. That way, for example, people like Roman could simply ignore threads or assumptions they have no interest in, and we could also avoid wasteful repetitions as people simple declare over and over their disagreements on the same basic points.

Here, since the subject line is Karl Pribram, I do feel some duty to comment.

On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 6:46 AM, 'Syamala Hari' via Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. <Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hi Bruno,

You say "How do you know that?" (implying how do I know that a robot's understanding is different from that of a human being's understanding). I expected that someone would ask that question and you did.
When a robot behaves as if it 'knows' or 'understands' something, it is able to exhibit the behavior, for example, turns right if it is given the instruction to turn right, because what is 'right' what is 'left' etc. are all coded into the robot's hardware.

This is simply not accurate. More precisely, it is design-dependent. SOME robots, like SOME biological organisms are designed

to follow fixed stimulus-response rules in which the stimulus is some function of current sensor inputs, or a fixed function of the stream of inputs. But some machine learning systems (robotic or other) learn over time which actions lead to preferred results, like the more advanced mammal brains which follow very similar reinforcement learning models, well known in animal behavior. These systems are not given instructions about what to do.

Of course, this is not a complete statement of the many levels both of machine and brain intelligence, let alone soul intelligence which is even further from being well explained by classic verbal discourse.

To do justice to the thoughts of Karl Pribram, we actually should get deeper into the levels of consciousness which we have observed out there , including more of what Freeman talked about in his review of Pribram's last book. (Thanks again to Sean for posting that review here). But I will wait for others to raise such further substantive points.

Although animals do not lie, their experience is also not directly accessible to others. That is what the theme of Nagel's paper "what it is to be like a bat".

I do remember a conversation with Pribram where he was a bit perplexed. He had ritual arguments ready for folks far to the left of him, and for others far to the right of him, but when I admitted that I believe BOTH in hard core objective reality (yea unto Einstein's extreme right-wing views, albeit with a realization of uncertainty and some caveats) AND in the solid reality and importance of "the soul" (with my own ideas of how to explain it), he did find it perplexing which way to go. Re the soul, he said he already had enough problems with being marginalized and with cultural taboos for the moderate statements he had made in that direction, and needed to be realistic (though his partner Katherine Neville felt quite free to go a bit further albeit with less qi).

Having gone further, ... about animal experience not being accessible:

There is an important story about Lao Tzu (probably in the CHuang Tzu collection) worth repeating:

Lao Tzu and a colleague walk by a beautiful babbling brook, with fishing leaping in and out of the water.

Lao Tzu says: "feel how happy the fish are!"

Colleague: "As you are not a fish, you cannot feel how happy they feel."

Lao Tzu: "As you are not Lao Tzu, you cannot feel what he feels."

There is a phenomenon which the most serious Western mystics have called "assumption." It is certainly not part of third party science, which was one very important compartment of Pribram's life (and my own). But in general, on this list, it is an important part of what first person science as such can address. Caveat: in psychiatry, Eisenbud has done important research related to this phenomenon, and perhaps someone in parapsychology has as well (I don't know).

Syamala

From: Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>

To: Online_Sadhu_Sanga@googlegroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2017 8:37 AM

Subject: Re: [Sadhu Sanga] Karl Pribram and the four letter words

On 19 Dec 2017, at 16:19, 'Syamala Hari' via Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. wrote:

High Whit,
Well, one can use the word 'meaning' with the meaning you suggested also. I did not mean it the way you suggested. While working with computers/robots, we frequently use the phrases: "It knows", "it understands", etc. There is a difference between a human being's knowing and understanding and a robot's "knowing" and "understanding" is it not? In fact, if you tell your dog to fetch a ball, the dog understands what you said and fetches the ball. The robot will also do the same and you may say the robot "understands" your instruction but its "understanding" is certainly different from a human being's or even the dog's "understanding" of your instruction.

How do you know that?

I think you can say that if the robot is an automata. In that case, it is controlable, always defined, etc. But that intuition can be shown not available for a computer or any universal machine (in arithmetic). After Turing)Gödel's work, we know that we know about nothing on what the universal machine are capable and not capable.

On the contrary, we know that such machine have a rich theology, and that such a theology contains, in its sharable probable parts, the whole of(public) physics, making that theory testable. And the test done up to now, confirms Mechanism (and thus suggests that weak materialism, physicalism, etc. are wrong).

In the case of the robot, the "turn right" instruction is a material process: giving it energy or momentum to initiate action followed by action according to instructions already coded into its hardware. Turnig right or fetching the ball is a completely material process in which the robot ha no conscious experience of anything. The content of a conscious experience or what a conscious being is aware of in an experience is what I called meaning in my post. We have different experiences. Seeing an apple and eating it. What we aware of in the two experiences is what I call the meanings of those actions, the actions themselves being material processes. This meaning is NOT matter or the material process which exist in both the human being (or dog) and in the robot.

Locally. But eventually, "matter" is only a meaningfull idea in the mind of the machine or the numbers. the solution of the mind-body problem already provided by the machine in arithmetic, is that "matter" does not exist, like in Plotinus and other rational mystic.

More simply, the meaning of a word is not the same as the word, or the sound we make when uttering the word because the same meaning can be conveyed by different words in different languages.

OK. Like a mind can be conveyed by different bodies or different representations in arithmetic.

Pribram found an accurate description in terms of Gabor functions, of the brain's material/physical memory which stores our experiences. Then he says that the Gabor function describes both the brain's physical memory and the psychological content also. What I say is that the gabor function is like a comuter's bit or qubit and different from the concept (psychological) concept. So his theory still does not solve the hard problem.

Even without mechanism, I think it is better when we do science, especially in metaphysics, to not invoke metaphysical notion, like primairy matter, in an explanation.

Many people confuse the evidence for a physical reality with evidence for physicalism or weak-materialism (the belief in primitive matter), but as the antic dream argument already has refuted, there is no evidence for any ontology (except personal consciousness), and with mechanism, it becomes invalid to assume anything more than numbers or similar inductive structures and laws.

Mechanism solves the hard problem of consciousness, in the sense that it explains why any universal machine introspecting itself get aware of something non-doubtable, true, and not justifiable rationally, concerning them. The machine already knows that they have a soul, and that the soul is not a machine. The hard problem is reduced in explaining physics from machine self-reference. They have a theology which includes physics, and so is testable, and it works until now.

Best,

Bruno

Best
Syamala

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Syamala Hari

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Dec 23, 2017, 4:44:36 PM12/23/17

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I do not deny that mind can be described by mathematics (Indian Philosophy implies that mind CAN be described by Mathematics as well as by other languages, for example, Sean says math is the noetic language for science and music is that for emotion) or the significance of Pribram's achievements (it is simply foolish to do so). I think that the brain's quantum matter or its wavefunction or quantum potential is not the same as its mind. Any experiment designed to verify a mathematical theory of mind necessarily includes a living being to verify a theoretically proposed link/correspondence between the measuring device's readings and a mental state, i.e., the first person experience: thought or emotion, or sensory experience etc. In a quantum measurement experiment, the quantum system reports its state via the measuring device. The quantum brain may report its quantum state via the measuring device but not the first person experience.

PRIBRAM DOES NOT AGREE WITH SEARLE THAT “MIND” IS MERELY A SECRETION OF THE BRAIN.

This is from Pribram's book The Form Within:

In the chapter Mind and Matter, Pribram says: “The story that emerges from my studies is consonant to a considerable extent with what Decartes had actually proposed, not what most current philosophers and scientists are interpreting him to have said. My espousal of Decartes’ proposal is contrary to the science: Thought can be defined technically in terms of Shannon’s measure of information; brain is made of the matter that physicists have been studying for centuries. Philosphers and brain scientists focused on Decartes’s distinction between mind and matter and have in many instances, come to feel that the distinction is, in the words of John Searle, the worst catastrophe ever to hit science and philosophy. (Searle suggests that “mind” is a secretion of the brain much as bile is a secretion of the liver…….liver and bail are both material, whereas brain and mind are different in kind)” this is what I was talking about.

Further in the chapter Meaning, Pribram says: “The ability to measure information (Shannon’s) was such a breakthrough in our ability to understand communication and computation that scientists felt that little else needed to be achieved. We were wrong. As we begin to test the theory in living organisms instead of artifacts such as telephones and computers, we found the theory woefully inadequate. The problem was and is that in ordinary communication between live organisms, we have to specify what is meant by the “amount of uncertainty” which needs to be reduced in order to achieve a measure of the amount of information, And your uncertainty may not be mine. ….. current neuroscientists continue to speak of ‘information processing” in its most popular usage to encompass “meaning”. This has the disadvantage that it fails to formulate a neuroscience of meaning in its own right…. Such formulation may be achieved by analogy to measurement in quantum physics: measuring meaning is most likely complementary to measuring information as uncertainty reduction.” As Freeman says Pribram indeed based his mathematics on quantum physics and field concepts and laid a comprehensive foundation for the future of brain dynamics.

Now to the arguments related to robots.

On Friday, December 22, 2017 1:14 PM, Paul Werbos <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:

..................

"some machine learning systems (robotic or other) learn over time which actions lead to preferred results, like the more advanced mammal brains which follow very similar reinforcement learning models, well known in animal behavior. These systems are not given instructions about what to do."

This argument was also gone over and over again on this blog as well as elsewhere. Actually, robots ARE all learning systems and they do learn a lot that was not coded into them initially. Learning and new program creation is what makes them artificial intelligent machines. Learning is done based on the initially entered instructions; and interpretation of newly created instructions follows the definitions initially entered into it by the programmer, which include for example, how 'left' and 'right' are coded initially into the hardware. The robot's 'knowledge' of left and right are precisely those records, nothing more nothing less.

Syamala

From: Paul Werbos <paul....@gmail.com>
To: "online_sa...@googlegroups.com" <Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, December 22, 2017 1:14 PM

Subject: Re: [Sadhu Sanga] Karl Pribram and the four letter words

Syamala

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Bruno Marchal

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Hi Syamala,

On 22 Dec 2017, at 12:46, 'Syamala Hari' via Sadhu-Sanga Under the holy association of Spd. B.M. Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. wrote:

Hi Bruno,

You say "How do you know that?" (implying how do I know that a robot's understanding is different from that of a human being's understanding). I expected that someone would ask that question and you did.
When a robot behaves as if it 'knows' or 'understands' something, it is able to exhibit the behavior, for example, turns right if it is given the instruction to turn right, because what is 'right' what is 'left' etc. are all coded into the robot's hardware. The robot's 'knowing/understanding' of 'right' is the same as having a record/representation of 'right' in its hardware. Afterwards, if you ask the robot, did you turn right or left, the robot would say that it turned right. It never lies and it is incapable of lying and it strictly implements the stored instructions. If the robot does not obey the instruction, the programmer/engineer can check both hardware and software and see what was wrong in its memory or what it 'knew' or 'understood' earlier and fix it. In other words, the engineer can access its 'knowledge'. On the other hand, a human being is capable of lying and has a great temptation to lie especially when he/she does an act while nobody else is watching, if the act is generally not approved by others. The reason for this temptation is that only the one who did the act, has the exact 'knowledge' of that act; nobody else can directly access it. So all the 'knowledge' of a robot is accessible to others. The 'knowledge' of a human being is not. Others have to depend upon what the former reports.
Although animals do not lie, their experience is also not directly accessible to others. That is what the theme of Nagel's paper "what it is to be like a bat".

Syamala

What you say concerns automata, or total computable function/machine. But is you add one instruction more to such automata, you obtain a Universal Turing Machine, and those are no more predictable, unrecognizable algorithmically (that is not even hard to prove and I might do it some day, it is based on a form of Cantor diagonalization) and they can refute all effective theory about them, making them fundamentally unknown, even to themselves. They do have a private knowledge, indeed the more they know, the bigger is the part of what they know without being able to justify it rationally.

And somehow, the incompleteness theorem of Gödel can be interpreted, in the Mechanist frame, by the fact that even, if not especially, the correct and honest universal machine can lie, and might be constrained to lie if they have universal goal (like "survive", for example).

And all what I say here is already said by the universal machine, (a variety of chatty one, studied by Gödel, Löb, Solovay).

It is not a speculation, it is part of computer science: if you define, or just circumscribe the theology of a machine by what is true about that machine, including its many personal modes of observing itself, the Löbian universal machine has already a rich "neoplatonic-like or neopythagorean-like theology). A Lôbian machine, roughly speaking, is a universal machine capable of proving that she is universal. (All humans are provably Löbian, probably high mammals and even the cuttlefishes, but (amazingly enough) Peano Arithmetic, Formal set theories, and many other "mathematical effective theories" are Löbian too.

That theology is testable (empirically refutable), because it contains the mathematical structure of the physical observable, (communicable (quanta) and non communicable (qualia)) and as far as we have been able to compare, it fits. Physics is retrieved by from a theory of knowledge/consciousness of the machine, and the quantum aspect of the observable reality confirms this. yet, physics appears only in the first person plural realities, making this a bit too much idealistic for me, but then I study only the logical consequence of the hypothesis of mechanism, taking into consideration of the extraordinary discovery of the Universal (Turing) Machine (known as computer when implemented/incarnated physically).

The Löbian machine knows (in the usual standard sense of most philosophers, the S4 theories) that they have a soul, and knows that their soul is NOT a machine (nor anything admitting a Third Person description), and they know that they are unable to prove it to you.

Before Gödel and Turing, we thought that we could, at least in principle, understand completely the numbers and the machines, but after, we understand that we can't. We know that machines and numbers can only scratch the arithmetical truth, but we know also that they can know much more than they can rationally justify, and why they understand where this comes from. (the effective character of some key diagonalization).

I think many mystic, in the West and in the East, have been very close. The initial (quite non dualist) Veda seem close, but I'm afraid India has not been immune against the (possible) illusion of the metaphysical primariness of the physical reality, which, with mechanism is only the internal statistics on the relative computations (relative to our indexical local states).

It should not been a problem for you. I do agree what you say on the human, I just think this applies also to all machines above the Turing-Universality threshold. Your laptop is almost at that level, but is also already restrained by tuns of software so that it obeys to you and send the mails accordingly. Somehow, the applied universal machine is born enslaved.

What is like to be a bat? What is like to be a human? What is like to be a Löbian machine/number? Basically the same, only their own "level" of enlightenment could decide, and of course only the Big One knows.

Bruno

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Kushal Shah

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Dec 24, 2017, 4:25:03 AM12/24/17

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I do not deny that mind can be described by mathematics (Indian Philosophy implies that mind CAN be described by Mathematics as well as by other languages

This point is not clear. Can you please elaborate? I thought Indian philosophy implies that mind is beyond the reach of language. If we go a little further, Advaita implies that even the gross physical existence cannot be fully described by mathematics or any language.

Thanks,

Kushal.

_________________________________________
Kushal Shah @ EECS Dept, IISER Bhopal
http://home.iiserb.ac.in/~kushals

Serge Patlavskiy

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Dec 24, 2017, 9:05:45 AM12/24/17

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Hi, Bruno and Syamala,

I argue that without an effective theory of consciousness there can be no positive solution to the AI problem. The case is that consciousness (according to my explanatory framework) can function in its sub-conscious regime, normal everyday regime, and ultra-conscious regime. The sub-conscious regime is mainly for keeping under control all the physiological processes in the organism; the normal everyday regime is mainly for producing thoughts based on logic and common sense; the ultra-conscious regime is mainly for the activity which pertains to intuition, telepathy, premonition, clairvoyance, telekinesis, OBE, NDE, and so on.

The normal everyday regime of functioning of consciousness is the only regime which is amenable to be studied by applying the third-person approach. But, this regime encompasses hardly 10% of all the possible activity of consciousness. The other two regimes, to be studied, require applying the first-person approach which should make use of the appropriate models and methods and which cardinally differ from the methods and models used in Physics and Biology. And ignoring this fact would be the same as trying to create a top of an iceberg and totally ignoring its underwater part.

So, before trying to simulate something we must, at least, understand what we are going to simulate. This is important to know beforehand because it may turn out that to create an artificial consciousness-possessing complex system is as an unfeasible task as to simulate the whole Universe.

Second. The case is that every consciousness-possessing organism is a part of some bigger (or, social) "organism". Living in society puts crucial restraints on the behavior of the members of society. The basic rule of co-existence is that an organism should do nothing to others that it would not like to be done by others in reference to it -- simply speaking, do as you would be done by. But, in case the first consciousness-possessing complex artificial self-organizing system is created, its behavior will become a pure/uncontrolled realization of possibilities provided by different regimes of functioning of its exemplar of consciousness. So, it cannot be predicted what repercussions may come when the social obligations will be shuffled off.

Kindly,

Serge Patlavskiy

From: Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>
To: Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Saturday, December 23, 2017 11:44 PM