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Hi Cosmin,
It seems your conclusion fits well with the conclusion already given by the universal machine (the Gödel-Löbian one which are those who already knows that they are Turing universal, like ZF, PA, or the combinators + some induction principle).Self-reference is capital indeed, but you seem to miss the mathematical theory of self-reference, brought by the work of Gödel and Löb, and Solovay ultimate formalisation of it at the first order logic level. You cite Penrose, which is deadly wrong on this.In fact incompleteness is a chance for mechanism, as it provides almost directly a theory of consciousness, if you are willing to agree that consciousness is true, indubitable, immediately knowable, non provable and non definable, as each Löbian machine is confronted to such proposition all the “time”. But this enforces also, as I have shown, that the whole of physics has to be justified by some of the modes of self-reference, making physics into a subbranch of elementary arithmetic. This works in the sense that at the three places where physics should appear we get a quantum logic, and this with the advantage of a transparent clear-cut between the qualia (not sharable) and the quanta (sharable in the first person plural sense).You seem to have a good (I mean correct with respect to Mechanism) insight on consciousness, but you seem to have wrong information on the theory of the digital machines/numbers and the role of Gödel. Gödel’s theorem is really a chance for the Mechanist theory, as it explains that the digital machine are non predictable, full of non communicable subjective knowledge and beliefs, and capable of defeating all reductionist theory that we can made of them. Indeed, they are literally universal dissident, and they are born with a conflict between 8 modes of self-apprehension. In my last paper(*) I argue that they can be enlightened, and this shows also that enlightenment and blasphemy are very close, and that religion leads easily to a theological trap making the machine inconsistent, except by staying mute, or referring to Mechanism (which is itself highly unprovable by the consistent machine).Bruno
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On 15 Apr 2019, at 20:28, za_wishy via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:Hmm... the thing is that what I'm arguing for in the book is that self-reference is unformalizable,
so there can be no mathematics of self-reference. More than this, self-reference is not some concept in a theory, but it is us, each and everyone of us is a form of manifestation of self-reference. Self-reference is an eternal logical structure that eternally looks-back-at-itself. And this looking-back-at-itself automatically generates a subjective ontology, an "I am”.
In other words, the very definition of the concept of "existence" is the looking-back-at-itself of self-reference.
So, existence can only be subjective, so all that can exists is consciousness.
I talk in the book how the looking-back-at-itself implies 3 properties: identity (self-reference is itself, x=x),
inclusion (self-reference is included in itself, x<x) and transcendence (self-reference is more than itself, x>x).
And all these apparently contradictory properties are happening all at the same time. So, x=x, x<x, x>x all at the same time.
But there is no actual contradiction here, because self-reference is unformalizable. The reason why I get to such weird conclusions is explored throughout the book where a phenomenological analysis of consciousness is done and it is shown how it is structured on an emergent holarchy of levels, a holarchy meaning that a higher level includes the lower levels, and I conclude that this can only happen if there is an entity called "self-reference" which has the above mentioned properties. So as you can see, there pretty much cannot be a mathematics of self-reference.
I will also present about self-reference at The Science of Consciousness conference this year at Interlaken, Switzerland, so if you are there we can talk more about these issues.
On Thursday, 11 April 2019 02:55:55 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:Hi Cosmin,It seems your conclusion fits well with the conclusion already given by the universal machine (the Gödel-Löbian one which are those who already knows that they are Turing universal, like ZF, PA, or the combinators + some induction principle).Self-reference is capital indeed, but you seem to miss the mathematical theory of self-reference, brought by the work of Gödel and Löb, and Solovay ultimate formalisation of it at the first order logic level. You cite Penrose, which is deadly wrong on this.In fact incompleteness is a chance for mechanism, as it provides almost directly a theory of consciousness, if you are willing to agree that consciousness is true, indubitable, immediately knowable, non provable and non definable, as each Löbian machine is confronted to such proposition all the “time”. But this enforces also, as I have shown, that the whole of physics has to be justified by some of the modes of self-reference, making physics into a subbranch of elementary arithmetic. This works in the sense that at the three places where physics should appear we get a quantum logic, and this with the advantage of a transparent clear-cut between the qualia (not sharable) and the quanta (sharable in the first person plural sense).You seem to have a good (I mean correct with respect to Mechanism) insight on consciousness, but you seem to have wrong information on the theory of the digital machines/numbers and the role of Gödel. Gödel’s theorem is really a chance for the Mechanist theory, as it explains that the digital machine are non predictable, full of non communicable subjective knowledge and beliefs, and capable of defeating all reductionist theory that we can made of them. Indeed, they are literally universal dissident, and they are born with a conflict between 8 modes of self-apprehension. In my last paper(*) I argue that they can be enlightened, and this shows also that enlightenment and blasphemy are very close, and that religion leads easily to a theological trap making the machine inconsistent, except by staying mute, or referring to Mechanism (which is itself highly unprovable by the consistent machine).Bruno--
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On 16 Apr 2019, at 00:34, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:"Matter" is just an idea in consciousness.
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On 16 Apr 2019, at 10:22, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:esoteric = "intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest." According to this definition, I'm not making self-reference esoteric. On the contrary, since I devote a whole book to it, the intention is to make self-reference to be understood by everyone. Probably you want to mean something else by esoteric, something like "out-of-this-world". But this again is not the case, because self-reference is the source of the entire existence, so it is pretty much part of the world.Also, your example with the Mars Rover is faulty, because the rover doesn't know anything. Knowledge is something that exists in consciousness. Only consciousnesses know things. And things indeed are formal entities, but the process of knowing itself is not. Actually, knowledge can be formal precisely because the processes of knowing is unformalizable.
On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 04:44:22 UTC+3, Brent wrote:You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars Rover knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is. Whether it is "formalizable" or not would seem to depend on choosing the right formalization to describe what engineers already create.
Brent
On 16 Apr 2019, at 10:28, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:Yes, no need to apply. They are using the concept of self-reference in a misleading way. The true meaning of self-reference is an entity that refers to itself. There are several problems with the way in which they are using the concept. First problem is that "machine" is not an entity. "Machine" is just an idea in consciousness, it doesn't have an independent existence, it doesn't have any ontological status, it doesn't exist as an entity. And since it doesn't exist, it cannot refer to itself, or for that matter it cannot do anything. Only consciousness (and its forms of manifestation: qualia) has ontological status.
The second issue is that the way self-reference refers to itself is to incorporate itself in the very act of referring.
Basically, the observer, the observed, and the act of observation are all one and the same thing.
I'm pretty much you cannot think of a machine in these terms. So a "self-referential machine" is just words-play.
It doesn't have anything in common whatsoever with the true characteristics of the true self-reference.
On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 09:24:46 UTC+3, Philip Thrift wrote:So, no need to apply? :)Seeking Research Fellows in Type Theory and Machine Self-Reference
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1) With mechanism, third-person self-reference is formalisable2) That is good insight, well recovered by the machine about its first person self.
3)
In other words, the very definition of the concept of "existence" is the looking-back-at-itself of self-reference.
That type of existence is phenomenological.
4)
So, existence can only be subjective, so all that can exists is consciousness.I see this as a critics of your theory. It is almost self-defeating. My goal was to understand matter and consciousness from proposition on which (almost) everybody agree, and with mechanism, elementary arithmetic is enough.
5)
OK. (Except the tiny formula which does not make much sense to me, and seem to assume a lot of things). But with mechanism we get 8 notion of self, and transcendance is indeed derived from them.
6)
esoteric = "intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest." According to this definition, I'm not making self-reference esoteric. On the contrary, since I devote a whole book to it, the intention is to make self-reference to be understood by everyone. Probably you want to mean something else by esoteric, something like "out-of-this-world". But this again is not the case, because self-reference is the source of the entire existence, so it is pretty much part of the world.
Also, your example with the Mars Rover is faulty, because the rover doesn't know anything.
Knowledge is something that exists in consciousness. Only consciousnesses know things. And things indeed are formal entities, but the process of knowing itself is not. Actually, knowledge can be formal precisely because the processes of knowing is unformalizable.
On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 04:44:22 UTC+3, Brent wrote:
You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars Rover knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is. Whether it is "formalizable" or not would seem to depend on choosing the right formalization to describe what engineers already create.
Brent
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Because Rover is just a bunch of atoms. Is nothing more than the sum of atoms.
But in the case of self-reference/emergence, each new level is more than the sum of the previous levels.
I don't know how you can trick yourself so badly into believing that if you put some rocks together, the rocks become alive.
Maybe because you think that the brain is just a bunch of atoms. No, it is now. If you were to measure what the electrons are doing in the brain, you would see that they are not moving according to known physics, but they are being moved by consciousness.
And this doesn't happen in a machine. In a machine, electrons move according to known physics.
On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 15:25:40 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:How can you argue that Rover has no knowledge, when you say that knowledge is not formalisable?
Introducing some fuzziness to claim a negative thing about a relation of the type consciousness/machine is a bit frightening. It reminds the catholic older sophisticated “reasoning” to assert that Indians have no soul.
Bruno
You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars Rover knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is.
Because Rover is just a bunch of atoms. Is nothing more than the sum of atoms. But in the case of self-reference/emergence, each new level is more than the sum of the previous levels.
I don't know how you can trick yourself so badly into believing that if you put some rocks together, the rocks become alive. Maybe because you think that the brain is just a bunch of atoms. No, it is now. If you were to measure what the electrons are doing in the brain, you would see that they are not moving according to known physics, but they are being moved by consciousness.
And this doesn't happen in a machine. In a machine, electrons move according to known physics.
On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 15:25:40 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:How can you argue that Rover has no knowledge, when you say that knowledge is not formalisable?Introducing some fuzziness to claim a negative thing about a relation of the type consciousness/machine is a bit frightening. It reminds the catholic older sophisticated “reasoning” to assert that Indians have no soul.Bruno
There are no electrons and no neurons. "Electrons" and "neurons" are just ideas in consciousness, are projections in the idea of "physical world" of processes that happen in consciousness.
And since in places where there is consciousness, consciousness has certain effects, it is normal for those effects to look different than in places where there is no conscious activity. Is like for example watching a recording of World of Warcraft on youtube vs. watching someone playing World of Warcraft live. In the recording the same things will happen over and over again, and they will be called "laws of physics", while watching someone playing live, different things will happen every time. As you can see, the image is the same: an elf running through the forest. But the effect are different. In the first case God decided the rules at the beginning, but there is no God anymore moving the electrons, they just repeat over and over again the initial trigger, while other electrons are actively influenced by currently existing consciousnesses. As you can see, the causal power doesn't lie in the electrons, but in the consciousnesses behind the curtains.
On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 21:35:50 UTC+3, Brent wrote:
How do you know this? Why can a bunch of neurons be conscious, but a bunch of electronics can't?
Brent
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On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 03:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars Rover knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is.
I don't agree that the Mars Rover checking "it's own" battery levels is an example of what is meant by self-reference in this type of discussion. The entity "Mars Rover" exists in your mind and mine, but there is no "Mars Rover mind" where it also exists. The entity "Telmo" exists in your mind and mine, and I happen to be an entity "Telmo" in whose mind the entity "Telmo" also exists. This is real self-reference.
Or, allow me to invent a programming language where something like this could me made more explicit. Let's say that, in this language, you can define a program P like this:
program P:
x = 1
if x == 1:
print('My variable x s holding the value 1')
The above is the weak form of self-reference that you allude to. It would be like me measuring my arm and noting the result. Oh, my arm is x cm long. But let me show what could me meant instead by real self-reference:
program P:
if length(P) > 1000:
print('I am a complicated program')
else:
print('I am a simple program')
Do you accept there is a fundamental difference here?
On 4/16/2019 6:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 03:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars Rover knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is.I don't agree that the Mars Rover checking "it's own" battery levels is an example of what is meant by self-reference in this type of discussion. The entity "Mars Rover" exists in your mind and mine, but there is no "Mars Rover mind" where it also exists. The entity "Telmo" exists in your mind and mine, and I happen to be an entity "Telmo" in whose mind the entity "Telmo" also exists. This is real self-reference.Or, allow me to invent a programming language where something like this could me made more explicit. Let's say that, in this language, you can define a program P like this:program P:x = 1if x == 1:print('My variable x s holding the value 1')The above is the weak form of self-reference that you allude to. It would be like me measuring my arm and noting the result. Oh, my arm is x cm long. But let me show what could me meant instead by real self-reference:program P:if length(P) > 1000:print('I am a complicated program')else:print('I am a simple program')Do you accept there is a fundamental difference here?I take your point. But I think the difference is only one of degree. In my example the Rover knows where it is, lat and long and topology. That entails having a model of the world, admittedly simple, in which the Rover is represented by itself.I would also say that I think far too much importance is attached to self-reference. It's just a part of intelligence to run "simulations" in trying to foresee the consequences of potential actions. The simulation must generally include the actor at some level. It's not some mysterious property raising up a ghost in the machine.
1)
First, that's false. The Rover is a very specific arrangement of atoms interacting with a specific environment. It has memory, purpose, and the ability to act.
2)
Try removing the phosphate atoms from your brain and see what you believe...if anything.
Maybe because you think that the brain is just a bunch of atoms. No, it is now. If you were to measure what the electrons are doing in the brain, you would see that they are not moving according to known physics, but they are being moved by consciousness.
3)
On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 18:42, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:Because Rover is just a bunch of atoms. Is nothing more than the sum of atoms. But in the case of self-reference/emergence, each new level is more than the sum of the previous levels.
1)
I disagree. My position on this is that people are tricked into thinking that emergence has some ontological status, when if fact it is just an epistemological tool. We need to think in higher-order structures to simplify things (organisms, organs, mean-fields, cells, ant colonies, societies, markets, etc), but a Jupiter-brain could keep track of every entity separately and apprehend the entire thing at the same time. Emergence is a mental shortcut.Self-reference is another matter (pun was accidental).I don't know how you can trick yourself so badly into believing that if you put some rocks together, the rocks become alive. Maybe because you think that the brain is just a bunch of atoms. No, it is now. If you were to measure what the electrons are doing in the brain, you would see that they are not moving according to known physics, but they are being moved by consciousness.
2)
For me, this is yet another version of "God did it". There is no point in attempting to explain some complex behavior if the explanation is even more complex and mysterious.
And this doesn't happen in a machine. In a machine, electrons move according to known physics.
3)
These are fairly extraordinary claims. Do you have any empirical data to support them?Telmo.
On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 15:25:40 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:How can you argue that Rover has no knowledge, when you say that knowledge is not formalisable?Introducing some fuzziness to claim a negative thing about a relation of the type consciousness/machine is a bit frightening. It reminds the catholic older sophisticated “reasoning” to assert that Indians have no soul.Bruno
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On 4/16/2019 12:43 PM, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:
There are no electrons and no neurons. "Electrons" and "neurons" are just ideas in consciousness, are projections in the idea of "physical world" of processes that happen in consciousness.
1)
I agree they are ideas of consciousness. But to say they are "just" ideas of consciousness, implies that they do not evolve according to their own laws. And I notice you said that consciousness moves them in ways inconsistent with physics; so you are biting the bullet on that point; which is testable.
And since in places where there is consciousness, consciousness has certain effects, it is normal for those effects to look different than in places where there is no conscious activity. Is like for example watching a recording of World of Warcraft on youtube vs. watching someone playing World of Warcraft live. In the recording the same things will happen over and over again, and they will be called "laws of physics", while watching someone playing live, different things will happen every time. As you can see, the image is the same: an elf running through the forest. But the effect are different. In the first case God decided the rules at the beginning, but there is no God anymore moving the electrons, they just repeat over and over again the initial trigger, while other electrons are actively influenced by currently existing consciousnesses. As you can see, the causal power doesn't lie in the electrons, but in the consciousnesses behind the curtains.
2)
1)
I take your point. But I think the difference is only one of degree. In my example the Rover knows where it is, lat and long and topology. That entails having a model of the world, admittedly simple, in which the Rover is represented by itself.
2)
1) Oh, I'm clearly not making that mistake. When I talk about emergence, I talk about ontological emergence, not the hand-waving epistemic kind that people usually talk about. The emergence that I'm talking about is the emergence of new qualia on top of previously existing qualia. This is what my book is about. So it's the real deal. Alternatively, have a look at my presentation from the Science & Nonduality conference where I talk about The Emergent Structure of Consciousness, where I talk about ontological emergence and I specifically mention to the audience that the epistemic emergence is false: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jMAy6ft-ZQ
And what realizes the ontological emergence is self-reference through its property of looking-back-at-itself, with looking-back becoming more than itself, like in the cover of the book.
2) Consciousness is not mysterious. And this is exactly what my book is doing: demystifying consciousness. If you decide to read my book, you will gain at the end of it a clarity of thinking through these issues that all people should have such that they will stop making the confusions that robots are alive.
3) No, they are not extraordinarily claims. They are quite trivial. And they start from the trivial realization that the brain does not exist. The "brain" is just an idea in consciousness.
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1) Well... It might be a very specific arrangement of atoms, but they are still governed by Newton's Laws. Is not like if you put them in certain order magic happens and new things start to appear. It has no memory, no purpose and no ability to act, since memory, purpose and ability to act are properties of consciousness.
2) Try removing yourself from the house in the middle of the winter. You will stop experience warmth, but this doesn't mean that the quale of warmth is generated by the house.
3) I have done the thinking. I don't have to do the experiment to know it is true.
On Wednesday, 17 April 2019 03:00:14 UTC+3, Brent wrote:1)
First, that's false. The Rover is a very specific arrangement of atoms interacting with a specific environment. It has memory, purpose, and the ability to act.
2)
Try removing the phosphate atoms from your brain and see what you believe...if anything.
3)Maybe because you think that the brain is just a bunch of atoms. No, it is now. If you were to measure what the electrons are doing in the brain, you would see that they are not moving according to known physics, but they are being moved by consciousness.
And have you done this observation? A Nobel prize awaits.
On 16 Apr 2019, at 18:04, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:1) What does "third-person" self-reference mean ?
To me, this would be equivalent to "third-person color red", which clearly is not the case for red to be third-person, since red only exists in an ontological subjective manner.
2) What "machine" ? What "self of the machine" ? "Machine" is just a concept in human consciousness. It doesn't exist beyond merely a concept.
3) Phenomenological is the only type of existence.
Everything else is merely an extrapolation starting from phenomenological existence.
i.e. I see an unicorn in my subjective first person existence, and then I extrapolate and say that that unicorn somehow has an independent existence from it being just a quale in my consciousness, which clearly is false.
4) You can set yourself all kinds of goals as you want. But this doesn't mean that reality is the way you want it to be. You can wish for red to be agreed upon by everyone, but a blind person will not agree.
5) There is only 1 notion of the Self: "I Am". But I would be interested to find out the 8 types of Self that you mention.
6) You can look at the emergent phenomenology. For example, in the visual domain you have: black-and-white -> shades-of-gray -> colors -> shapes -> objects -> full visual scene. All these levels have the properties that each level inherits the qualities of the previous levels, while also bringing into existence its own quality.
For example, the reason why a color can variate from lighter to darker is because it inherits in itself the quality of shades-of-gray. And if you think carefully about this, this is possible because of the properties of self-reference that I just mentioned, x=x (color is itself), x<x (shades-of-gray are included in color), x>x (color is more than the shades-of-gray).
And all these happen at the same time, because the same consciousness is the one that experience the evolution in levels. When you learn something new, that new knowledge emerges on top of previously held knowledge, but this doesn't create a new consciousness to experience the new knowledge, but the same consciousness is maintained.
And this is possible because the same consciousness (x=x)
includes the previous consciousness that it was (x<x) and becomes more than what it previously was (x>x).
On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 15:17:36 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:1) With mechanism, third-person self-reference is formalisable2) That is good insight, well recovered by the machine about its first person self.3)In other words, the very definition of the concept of "existence" is the looking-back-at-itself of self-reference.That type of existence is phenomenological.4)So, existence can only be subjective, so all that can exists is consciousness.I see this as a critics of your theory. It is almost self-defeating. My goal was to understand matter and consciousness from proposition on which (almost) everybody agree, and with mechanism, elementary arithmetic is enough.5)OK. (Except the tiny formula which does not make much sense to me, and seem to assume a lot of things). But with mechanism we get 8 notion of self, and transcendance is indeed derived from them.6)And all these apparently contradictory properties are happening all at the same time. So, x=x, x<x, x>x all at the same time.Without giving a theory or at least a realm, it is hard to figure out what you mean.But there is no actual contradiction here, because self-reference is unformalizable. The reason why I get to such weird conclusions is explored throughout the book where a phenomenological analysis of consciousness is done and it is shown how it is structured on an emergent holarchy of levels, a holarchy meaning that a higher level includes the lower levels, and I conclude that this can only happen if there is an entity called "self-reference" which has the above mentioned properties. So as you can see, there pretty much cannot be a mathematics of self-reference.But such theories exist. Even the fact that the first person self-reference is not formalisable is provable in a meta-theory.Self-reference is where mathematical logic has got many surprising results, and with mechanism, they are somehow directly usable. To not use them needs some non-mechanist hypothesis, for which there are no evidences, and it looks like bringing complexity to not solve a (scientific) problem.
On 16 Apr 2019, at 15:10, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 03:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars Rover knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is.I don't agree that the Mars Rover checking "it's own" battery levels is an example of what is meant by self-reference in this type of discussion.
The entity "Mars Rover" exists in your mind and mine, but there is no "Mars Rover mind" where it also exists.
The entity "Telmo" exists in your mind and mine, and I happen to be an entity "Telmo" in whose mind the entity "Telmo" also exists. This is real self-reference.
Or, allow me to invent a programming language where something like this could me made more explicit. Let's say that, in this language, you can define a program P like this:program P:x = 1if x == 1:print('My variable x s holding the value 1')The above is the weak form of self-reference that you allude to.
It would be like me measuring my arm and noting the result. Oh, my arm is x cm long. But let me show what could me meant instead by real self-reference:program P:if length(P) > 1000:print('I am a complicated program')else:print('I am a simple program')Do you accept there is a fundamental difference here?
On 16 Apr 2019, at 18:56, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 18:42, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:Because Rover is just a bunch of atoms. Is nothing more than the sum of atoms. But in the case of self-reference/emergence, each new level is more than the sum of the previous levels.I disagree. My position on this is that people are tricked into thinking that emergence has some ontological status, when if fact it is just an epistemological tool. We need to think in higher-order structures to simplify things (organisms, organs, mean-fields, cells, ant colonies, societies, markets, etc), but a Jupiter-brain could keep track of every entity separately and apprehend the entire thing at the same time. Emergence is a mental shortcut.Self-reference is another matter (pun was accidental).
I don't know how you can trick yourself so badly into believing that if you put some rocks together, the rocks become alive. Maybe because you think that the brain is just a bunch of atoms. No, it is now. If you were to measure what the electrons are doing in the brain, you would see that they are not moving according to known physics, but they are being moved by consciousness.For me, this is yet another version of "God did it". There is no point in attempting to explain some complex behavior if the explanation is even more complex and mysterious.
And this doesn't happen in a machine. In a machine, electrons move according to known physics.These are fairly extraordinary claims. Do you have any empirical data to support them?
On 17 Apr 2019, at 08:08, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:On Wed, Apr 17, 2019, at 05:03, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:On 4/16/2019 6:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 03:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars Rover knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is.I don't agree that the Mars Rover checking "it's own" battery levels is an example of what is meant by self-reference in this type of discussion. The entity "Mars Rover" exists in your mind and mine, but there is no "Mars Rover mind" where it also exists. The entity "Telmo" exists in your mind and mine, and I happen to be an entity "Telmo" in whose mind the entity "Telmo" also exists. This is real self-reference.Or, allow me to invent a programming language where something like this could me made more explicit. Let's say that, in this language, you can define a program P like this:program P:x = 1if x == 1:print('My variable x s holding the value 1')The above is the weak form of self-reference that you allude to. It would be like me measuring my arm and noting the result. Oh, my arm is x cm long. But let me show what could me meant instead by real self-reference:program P:if length(P) > 1000:print('I am a complicated program')else:print('I am a simple program')Do you accept there is a fundamental difference here?I take your point. But I think the difference is only one of degree. In my example the Rover knows where it is, lat and long and topology. That entails having a model of the world, admittedly simple, in which the Rover is represented by itself.I would also say that I think far too much importance is attached to self-reference. It's just a part of intelligence to run "simulations" in trying to foresee the consequences of potential actions. The simulation must generally include the actor at some level. It's not some mysterious property raising up a ghost in the machine.With self-reference comes also self-modification. The self-replicators of nature that slowly adapt and complexify, the brain "rewiring itself"... Things get both weird and generative. I suspect that it goes to the core of what human intelligence is, and what computer intelligence is not (yet). But if you say that self-reference has not magic property that explains consciousness, I agree with you.
On consciousness I have nothing interesting to say (no jokes about ever having had, please :). I think that:consciousness = existence
Existence entails self-referential machines, self-referential evolutionary processes, the whole shebang. But not the other way around.
On 17 Apr 2019, at 08:18, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:It's actually the other way around: biology is realized by certain processes happening in consciousness. Biology is just an external appearance of internal processes happening in consciousness.
On Wednesday, 17 April 2019 02:29:24 UTC+3, Brent wrote:
What makes them "biological"? Do they have to be made of amino acids?
nuclei acids? do they have to be powered by a phosphate cycle? What
makes one bunch of biological molecules conscious and another very
similar bunch dead, or anesthesized?
The only coherent answer is that consciousness is realized by certain
information processing...independent of the molecules instantiating the
process.
Brent
> On 17 Apr 2019, at 01:29, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 4/16/2019 6:42 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>> In the experientialist (Strawson-Goff-etc. "panpsychist" view): experiential qualia (EQ) exist in matter at some level on their own -- and EQ cannot be reduced to information (numbers).
>>
>> So real "selfness" cannot be achieved in any "Gödel-Löb-etc." theorem prover running on the so-called conventional computer.
>>
>> Now some future biological computers -- made via synthetic biology -- open new possibilities.
>
> What makes them "biological"? Do they have to be made of amino acids? nuclei acids? do they have to be powered by a phosphate cycle? What makes one bunch of biological molecules conscious and another very similar bunch dead, or anesthesized?
>
> The only coherent answer is that consciousness is realized by certain information processing...independent of the molecules instantiating the process.
Good point, and this is what will lead, when assuming the process are digital, to associate a mind to all “enough similar” digital process realised, in the precise sense of Church and Turing, in arithmetic. It is the same information which os processed, at the “right” level, which exist by the assumption of digital mechanism.
Bruno
φbits = 2bits+qbits (physical bits: information)
ψbits = xbits (psychical bits: experience)
On Wed, Apr 17, 2019, at 05:03, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
On 4/16/2019 6:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 03:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars Rover knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is.
I don't agree that the Mars Rover checking "it's own" battery levels is an example of what is meant by self-reference in this type of discussion. The entity "Mars Rover" exists in your mind and mine, but there is no "Mars Rover mind" where it also exists. The entity "Telmo" exists in your mind and mine, and I happen to be an entity "Telmo" in whose mind the entity "Telmo" also exists. This is real self-reference.
Or, allow me to invent a programming language where something like this could me made more explicit. Let's say that, in this language, you can define a program P like this:
program P:
x = 1
if x == 1:
print('My variable x s holding the value 1')
The above is the weak form of self-reference that you allude to. It would be like me measuring my arm and noting the result. Oh, my arm is x cm long. But let me show what could me meant instead by real self-reference:
program P:
if length(P) > 1000:
print('I am a complicated program')
else:
print('I am a simple program')
Do you accept there is a fundamental difference here?
I take your point. But I think the difference is only one of degree. In my example the Rover knows where it is, lat and long and topology. That entails having a model of the world, admittedly simple, in which the Rover is represented by itself.
I would also say that I think far too much importance is attached to self-reference. It's just a part of intelligence to run "simulations" in trying to foresee the consequences of potential actions. The simulation must generally include the actor at some level. It's not some mysterious property raising up a ghost in the machine.
With self-reference comes also self-modification. The self-replicators of nature that slowly adapt and complexify, the brain "rewiring itself"... Things get both weird and generative. I suspect that it goes to the core of what human intelligence is, and what computer intelligence is not (yet). But if you say that self-reference has not magic property that explains consciousness, I agree with you.
On consciousness I have nothing interesting to say (no jokes about ever having had, please :). I think that:
consciousness = existence
Existence entails self-referential machines, self-referential evolutionary processes, the whole shebang. But not the other way around.
- pt
On 4/16/2019 11:23 PM, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:
1) Well... It might be a very specific arrangement of atoms, but they are still governed by Newton's Laws. Is not like if you put them in certain order magic happens and new things start to appear. It has no memory, no purpose and no ability to act, since memory, purpose and ability to act are properties of consciousness.
1)
But a Mars Rover with artificial intelligence does have purpose, to collect and analyze various data. It has the ability to act, to travel, to take samples, to communicate. It has memory of its purpose, where it's been, and for an AI system, even the ability to learn. Yes, no magic happens. But new things start to appear just as certain arrangements of atoms are your computer that can transform and display these symbols but in another arrangement would be just a lump of metal and plastic.
2) Try removing yourself from the house in the middle of the winter. You will stop experience warmth, but this doesn't mean that the quale of warmth is generated by the house.
True. But something is different about inside and outside the house that is not ONLY in your consciousness, because others agree about it and measure it...it's called temperature.
3) I have done the thinking. I don't have to do the experiment to know it is true.
2)
That's what all the scholastics thought.
Brent
--
On Wednesday, 17 April 2019 03:00:14 UTC+3, Brent wrote:1)
First, that's false. The Rover is a very specific arrangement of atoms interacting with a specific environment. It has memory, purpose, and the ability to act.
2)
Try removing the phosphate atoms from your brain and see what you believe...if anything.
3)Maybe because you think that the brain is just a bunch of atoms. No, it is now. If you were to measure what the electrons are doing in the brain, you would see that they are not moving according to known physics, but they are being moved by consciousness.
And have you done this observation? A Nobel prize awaits.
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machine
1) Oh, I'm clearly not making that mistake. When I talk about emergence, I talk about ontological emergence, not the hand-waving epistemic kind that people usually talk about. The emergence that I'm talking about is the emergence of new qualia on top of previously existing qualia. This is what my book is about. So it's the real deal. Alternatively, have a look at my presentation from the Science & Nonduality conference where I talk about The Emergent Structure of Consciousness, where I talk about ontological emergence and I specifically mention to the audience that the epistemic emergence is false: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jMAy6ft-ZQAnd what realizes the ontological emergence is self-reference through its property of looking-back-at-itself, with looking-back becoming more than itself, like in the cover of the book.
2) Consciousness is not mysterious. And this is exactly what my book is doing: demystifying consciousness. If you decide to read my book, you will gain at the end of it a clarity of thinking through these issues that all people should have such that they will stop making the confusions that robots are alive.
3) No, they are not extraordinarily claims. They are quite trivial. And they start from the trivial realization that the brain does not exist. The "brain" is just an idea in consciousness.
On Wednesday, 17 April 2019 03:06:45 UTC+3, telmo wrote:
On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 18:42, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:Because Rover is just a bunch of atoms. Is nothing more than the sum of atoms. But in the case of self-reference/emergence, each new level is more than the sum of the previous levels.
1)
I disagree. My position on this is that people are tricked into thinking that emergence has some ontological status, when if fact it is just an epistemological tool. We need to think in higher-order structures to simplify things (organisms, organs, mean-fields, cells, ant colonies, societies, markets, etc), but a Jupiter-brain could keep track of every entity separately and apprehend the entire thing at the same time. Emergence is a mental shortcut.Self-reference is another matter (pun was accidental).
I don't know how you can trick yourself so badly into believing that if you put some rocks together, the rocks become alive. Maybe because you think that the brain is just a bunch of atoms. No, it is now. If you were to measure what the electrons are doing in the brain, you would see that they are not moving according to known physics, but they are being moved by consciousness.2)
For me, this is yet another version of "God did it". There is no point in attempting to explain some complex behavior if the explanation is even more complex and mysterious.
And this doesn't happen in a machine. In a machine, electrons move according to known physics.3)
These are fairly extraordinary claims. Do you have any empirical data to support them?
Telmo.
On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 15:25:40 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:How can you argue that Rover has no knowledge, when you say that knowledge is not formalisable?Introducing some fuzziness to claim a negative thing about a relation of the type consciousness/machine is a bit frightening. It reminds the catholic older sophisticated “reasoning” to assert that Indians have no soul.Bruno
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Then the mathematical theory of self-reference explains why machine will conclude that they are conscious, in that sense. They will know that they know something that they cannot doubt, yet cannot prove to us, or to anyone. And they can understand that they can test mechanism by observation.Existence entails self-referential machines, self-referential evolutionary processes, the whole shebang. But not the other way around.Existence of the natural numbers + the laws of addition and multiplication does that, and also justify what you don’t get any of that with any weaker theory, having less axioms, than Robinson Arithmetic.We have to assume numbers if we want just define precisely what a machine is, but we cannot assume a physical universe: that is the price, we have to derive it from arithmetic “seen from inside”.
Hi Cosmin,On Wed, Apr 17, 2019, at 08:42, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:1) Oh, I'm clearly not making that mistake. When I talk about emergence, I talk about ontological emergence, not the hand-waving epistemic kind that people usually talk about. The emergence that I'm talking about is the emergence of new qualia on top of previously existing qualia. This is what my book is about. So it's the real deal. Alternatively, have a look at my presentation from the Science & Nonduality conference where I talk about The Emergent Structure of Consciousness, where I talk about ontological emergence and I specifically mention to the audience that the epistemic emergence is false: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jMAy6ft-ZQAnd what realizes the ontological emergence is self-reference through its property of looking-back-at-itself, with looking-back becoming more than itself, like in the cover of the book.Ok, I saw your presentation. We agree on several things, but I don't quite get your qualia emergence idea. The things you describe make sense, for example the dissolution of meaning by repetition, but what makes you think that this is anything more than an observation in the domain of the cognitive sciences? Or, putting it another way, and observation / model on how our cognitive processes work?2) Consciousness is not mysterious. And this is exactly what my book is doing: demystifying consciousness. If you decide to read my book, you will gain at the end of it a clarity of thinking through these issues that all people should have such that they will stop making the confusions that robots are alive.I don't mean to discourage or attack you in anyway,
but one in a while someone with a book to promote shows up in this mailing list. No problem with me, I have promoted some of my work sometimes. My problem is with "if you read my book...". There are many books to read, please give the main ideas. Then I might read it.3) No, they are not extraordinarily claims. They are quite trivial. And they start from the trivial realization that the brain does not exist. The "brain" is just an idea in consciousness.I have no problem with "the brain is just an idea in consciousess". I am not sure if this type of claim can be verified, or if it falls into the category of things we cannot assert, as Bruno would say. I do tend to think privately in those terms.
So ok, the brain does not exist. It is just a bunch of qualia in consciousness. But this is then true of every single thing!
Again, no problem with this, but also no reason to abandon science.
On 18 Apr 2019, at 12:05, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:Before going deeper into analyzing your claims, I would like to know if your concept of machine has free will. Because this is a very important concept for consciousness. If you machine doesn't have free will, then you are not talking about consciousness.
On Wednesday, 17 April 2019 19:08:40 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:machine
On 18 Apr 2019, at 14:33, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:There areI: InformationE: ExperienceM: MatterSome think selfhood can be made of pure-I; others think pure-E.Most modern materialists think I-type M is enough.But experiential materialists think it's (E+I)-type M.The ancient materialist Epicurus thought there were physical (I) and psychical (E) atoms, so he was already an experiential materialist.
- pt
On Thursday, April 18, 2019 at 5:34:16 AM UTC-5, Cosmin Visan wrote:The only downside being that... the robot does not exist. People are tricking themselves too easily into personifying objects. There is no robot there, there are just a bunch of atoms that bang into each others. You can move those atoms around all day long as you want. You will not create self-reference or "self models" or "imaginations of itself". These are just concepts that exist in the mind of the "researchers" and the "researchers" not getting outside of the lab too often, start to believe their own fantasies.
On Thursday, 18 April 2019 10:11:09 UTC+3, Philip Thrift wrote:Columbia engineers create a robot that can imagine itself
For instance, without an observer to interpret a certain pile of atoms as a machine, it is just a pile of atoms.Are you saying that Mars Rover cannot interpret some of its data on Mars, when nobody observed it, or are you saying that Mars Rover has enough observation abilities?
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What does "self model" even mean ? Notice that any material attempt to implement "self model" leads to infinite regress.
--
The only downside being that... the robot does not exist. People are tricking themselves too easily into personifying objects. There is no robot there, there are just a bunch of atoms
that bang into each others. You can move those atoms around all day long as you want. You will not create self-reference or "self models" or "imaginations of itself". These are just concepts that exist in the mind of the "researchers" and the "researchers" not getting outside of the lab too often, start to believe their own fantasies.
On Thursday, 18 April 2019 10:11:09 UTC+3, Philip Thrift wrote:
Columbia engineers create a robot that can imagine itself
Hi Cosmin,
1)
On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 03:17:59AM -0700, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:
Self-reference is formalisable. See Löb's theorem.
Then the mathematical theory of self-reference explains why machine will conclude that they are conscious, in that sense. They will know that they know something that they cannot doubt, yet cannot prove to us, or to anyone. And they can understand that they can test mechanism by observation.Existence entails self-referential machines, self-referential evolutionary processes, the whole shebang. But not the other way around.Existence of the natural numbers + the laws of addition and multiplication does that, and also justify what you don’t get any of that with any weaker theory, having less axioms, than Robinson Arithmetic.We have to assume numbers if we want just define precisely what a machine is, but we cannot assume a physical universe: that is the price, we have to derive it from arithmetic “seen from inside”.I agree.My point is much less sophisticated. It is such a trivial observation that I would call it a Lapalissade. And yet, in out current culture, you risk being considered insance for saying it:Our first-person experience of the world is what exists, as far as we know.
Everything else is a model, including the third-person view.
There was no Big Bang at the same ontological level that there is a blue pen in my desk, because the Big Bang is nobody's experience (or is it?).
The Big Bang is something that the machine has to answer if you ask it certain questions. As you say, if the machine is consistent then the big bang is "true" in a sense, if the macine is malevolent all bets are off.
On 18 Apr 2019, at 19:34, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 4/18/2019 2:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
What makes the Mars Rover a machine is that it can act and react to its environment.For instance, without an observer to interpret a certain pile of atoms as a machine, it is just a pile of atoms.Are you saying that Mars Rover cannot interpret some of its data on Mars, when nobody observed it, or are you saying that Mars Rover has enough observation abilities?
If it's an AI Rover it can learn and plan and reflect.
To invoke an "observer" is just push the problem away to "What is an observer?”
Brent
On 18 Apr 2019, at 19:56, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 4/18/2019 3:17 AM, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:
What does "self model" even mean ? Notice that any material attempt to implement "self model" leads to infinite regress.
No. A "model" is not a complete description, it's a representation of some specific aspects.
Your "self-reference" cannot refer to everything about yourself...which according to you is a stream of consciousness.
Brent
Because let's say that a machine has the parts A B C. To have a "self model" would mean to have another part (A B C) which would contain the "self model". But this would be an extra part of the "self" which would be needed to be included in the "self model" in order to actually have a "self model", so you would need another part (A B C (A B C)). But then again you would need to include this part as well in the "self model". So you will get to infinite regress.
On 19 Apr 2019, at 09:16, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:It's still not clear to me what your concept of "machine" is. Is it just an abstract theory or is it some actually existing entity ?
If it is actually existing,
is it made out of atoms ? Because if it is made out of atoms, where does its free will come from ?
In the case of humans free will comes from the fact that we are not made out of atoms, but we are consciousnesses, "atoms" being just ideas in us.
On Thursday, 18 April 2019 17:04:15 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:They have as much free will as human (direct consequence of the Mechanist assumption).
On 18 Apr 2019, at 12:17, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:What does "self model" even mean ? Notice that any material attempt to implement "self model" leads to infinite regress. Because let's say that a machine has the parts A B C. To have a "self model" would mean to have another part (A B C) which would contain the "self model". But this would be an extra part of the "self" which would be needed to be included in the "self model" in order to actually have a "self model", so you would need another part (A B C (A B C)). But then again you would need to include this part as well in the "self model". So you will get to infinite regress.
Therefore, you need a special kind of entity to obtained the desired effect without getting into infinite regress. And that's precisely why the self-reference that I'm talking about in the book is unformalizable.
And as you say, being unformalizable, allows for bootstrapping consciousness into existence.
You cannot simulate self-reference just by playing around with atoms. Self-reference just is.
It just is the source of the entire existence.
Is not up to anyone to simulate the source of existence.
You can never obtain the properties of consciousness (meaning, purpose, free will, memory, intelligence, learning, acting, etc.) just by playing around with a bunch of atoms.
All these properties of consciousness are having their source in the unformalizable self-reference.
On Thursday, 18 April 2019 04:00:31 UTC+3, Russell Standish wrote:each consciousness bootstraps its own
meaning from self-reference. Unless the mars rover has a self model in
its code (and I don't think it was constructed that way), then I would
extremely doubt it has any sort of consciousness.
1) The qualia of black-and-white is not on the same level with the qualia of colors. The qualia of colors include the qualia of black-and-white. You cannot see a color if that color is not emergent upon black-and-white (or more specifically shades-of-gray). You cannot experience music if music is not emergent upon sounds. You cannot taste chocolate if chocolate is not emergent upon sweet. You cannot understand Pythagoras Theorem if the understanding of Pythagoras Theorem doesn't emerge upon the understandings of triangles, angles, lengths, etc. And this is real emergence, because you really get new existent entities that never existed before in the history of existence. God himself never experienced these qualia.
I don't understand your second part of the question regarding our "cognitive processes". Are you referring to our specific form of human consciousness ? I don't think this is only restricted to our human consciousness, for the reason that it happens to all qualia that we have. All qualia domains are structured in an emergent way.
2) The main ideas in my book are the emergent structure of consciousness and the self-reference which gives birth to the emergent structure. The ideas about self-reference that I have are rooted in phenomenology. First I observe that consciousness is structured in an emergent way, and then I conclude that the reason it is like this is because there is an entity called "self-reference" that looks-back-at-itself and in this process includes the previously existing self and brings a new transcendent self into existence, like in the case of colors emerging on top of black-and-white.
3) The difference is that in an emergent system you have top-down influence in levels. Electrons in simple systems like the ones in physical experiments have little input from any top level, so they behaving according to their own level and display certain laws. But when they are part of a greater holistic system, like in the brain (which is just an appearance of internal workings in consciousness) they receive top-down influence from the intentions in consciousness, and so they behave according to the will of consciousness. Is the same phenomenon when we speak, that I also gave in my presentation. When we speak, we act from the level of intending to transmit certain ideas. And this level exercises top-down influence in levels and the sentences, words and letters are coming out in accordance with the intention from the higher level.
On Thursday, 18 April 2019 16:22:18 UTC+3, telmo wrote:Hi Cosmin,1)Ok, I saw your presentation. We agree on several things, but I don't quite get your qualia emergence idea. The things you describe make sense, for example the dissolution of meaning by repetition, but what makes you think that this is anything more than an observation in the domain of the cognitive sciences? Or, putting it another way, and observation / model on how our cognitive processes work?2) Consciousness is not mysterious. And this is exactly what my book is doing: demystifying consciousness. If you decide to read my book, you will gain at the end of it a clarity of thinking through these issues that all people should have such that they will stop making the confusions that robots are alive.I don't mean to discourage or attack you in anyway, but one in a while someone with a book to promote shows up in this mailing list. No problem with me, I have promoted some of my work sometimes. My problem is with "if you read my book...". There are many books to read, please give the main ideas. Then I might read it.3) No, they are not extraordinarily claims. They are quite trivial. And they start from the trivial realization that the brain does not exist. The "brain" is just an idea in consciousness.I have no problem with "the brain is just an idea in consciousess". I am not sure if this type of claim can be verified, or if it falls into the category of things we cannot assert, as Bruno would say. I do tend to think privately in those terms.So ok, the brain does not exist. It is just a bunch of qualia in consciousness. But this is then true of every single thing! Again, no problem with this, but also no reason to abandon science. The machine doesn't exist either, but its elections (that don't exist either) follow a certain pattern of behavior that we call the laws of physics. Why not the electrons in the brain? What's the difference?Telmo.
1)
There is something here that still does not convince me. For example, you say that the "chocolate taste" qualia emerges from simpler qualia, such as "sweet". Can you really justify this hierarchical relation without implicitly alluding to the quanti side? Consider the qualias of eating a piece of chocolate, a spoonful of sugar and french fries. You can feel that the first two have something in common that distinguishes them from the third, and you can give it the label "sweet". At the same time, you could say that the chocolate and french fries are pleasant to eat, while the spoonful of sugar not so much. You can also label this abstraction with some word. Without empirical grounding, nothing makes one distinction more meaningful than another.What makes the "sweat" abstraction so special? Well, it's that we know about sweet receptors in the tongue and we know it's one of the four(five?) basic flavors because of that. I'm afraid you smuggle this knowledge into the pure qualia world. Without it, there is no preferable hierarchical relation and emergence becomes nonsensical again. There's just a field of qualia.
2)
I was referring to your observation that things lose meaning by repetition, like staring at yourself in the mirror for a long time. I to find this interesting, but I can imagine prosaic explanations. For example, that our brain requires a certain amount of variety in its inputs, otherwise it tends to a simpler state were apprehension of meaning is no longer possible. In other words, I am proposing a plumber-style explanation, and asking you why/if you think it can be discarded?
3) The difference is that in an emergent system you have top-down influence in levels. Electrons in simple systems like the ones in physical experiments have little input from any top level, so they behaving according to their own level and display certain laws. But when they are part of a greater holistic system, like in the brain (which is just an appearance of internal workings in consciousness) they receive top-down influence from the intentions in consciousness, and so they behave according to the will of consciousness. Is the same phenomenon when we speak, that I also gave in my presentation. When we speak, we act from the level of intending to transmit certain ideas. And this level exercises top-down influence in levels and the sentences, words and letters are coming out in accordance with the intention from the higher level.
3)
Here I think you are making the ontological/epistemological confusion. Another way to describe what you are alluding to above is this: the more complex a system, the higher the amount of branching in the trees of causation that extend into the past. To describe the movement of an election in the ideal conditions of some laboratory experiment, you might just require a couple of equations and variables. To describe the movement of an election in the incredible wet mess that is the human brain, you require trillions of equations with trillions of variables.The identification of patterns across scales allows us to vastly compress the information of the object we are looking at, making it somewhat tractable by our limited intellects. Some of these patters have names such as "speaking", "word", "presentation", "red", etc. These patterns are not arbitrarily grounded, they are grounded by some correspondence with qualia, as I argue above. Why? I don't have the answer, I think it's a mystery.I am not saying that the point of view you describe above is not valid or interesting, but I am saying that it is nothing more than epistemology.Telmo.
On Thursday, 18 April 2019 16:22:18 UTC+3, telmo wrote:Hi Cosmin,1)Ok, I saw your presentation. We agree on several things, but I don't quite get your qualia emergence idea. The things you describe make sense, for example the dissolution of meaning by repetition, but what makes you think that this is anything more than an observation in the domain of the cognitive sciences? Or, putting it another way, and observation / model on how our cognitive processes work?2) Consciousness is not mysterious. And this is exactly what my book is doing: demystifying consciousness. If you decide to read my book, you will gain at the end of it a clarity of thinking through these issues that all people should have such that they will stop making the confusions that robots are alive.I don't mean to discourage or attack you in anyway, but one in a while someone with a book to promote shows up in this mailing list. No problem with me, I have promoted some of my work sometimes. My problem is with "if you read my book...". There are many books to read, please give the main ideas. Then I might read it.3) No, they are not extraordinarily claims. They are quite trivial. And they start from the trivial realization that the brain does not exist. The "brain" is just an idea in consciousness.I have no problem with "the brain is just an idea in consciousess". I am not sure if this type of claim can be verified, or if it falls into the category of things we cannot assert, as Bruno would say. I do tend to think privately in those terms.So ok, the brain does not exist. It is just a bunch of qualia in consciousness. But this is then true of every single thing! Again, no problem with this, but also no reason to abandon science. The machine doesn't exist either, but its elections (that don't exist either) follow a certain pattern of behavior that we call the laws of physics. Why not the electrons in the brain? What's the difference?Telmo.
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On Fri, Apr 19, 2019, at 09:09, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:
1) The qualia of black-and-white is not on the same level with the qualia of colors. The qualia of colors include the qualia of black-and-white. You cannot see a color if that color is not emergent upon black-and-white (or more specifically shades-of-gray). You cannot experience music if music is not emergent upon sounds. You cannot taste chocolate if chocolate is not emergent upon sweet. You cannot understand Pythagoras Theorem if the understanding of Pythagoras Theorem doesn't emerge upon the understandings of triangles, angles, lengths, etc. And this is real emergence, because you really get new existent entities that never existed before in the history of existence. God himself never experienced these qualia.
Ok, I think I understand your presentation better now. You make an interesting point, I don't think I ever considered emergence purely on the side of qualia as you describe.
There is something here that still does not convince me. For example, you say that the "chocolate taste" qualia emerges from simpler qualia, such as "sweet". Can you really justify this hierarchical relation without implicitly alluding to the quanti side? Consider the qualias of eating a piece of chocolate, a spoonful of sugar and french fries. You can feel that the first two have something in common that distinguishes them from the third, and you can give it the label "sweet". At the same time, you could say that the chocolate and french fries are pleasant to eat, while the spoonful of sugar not so much. You can also label this abstraction with some word. Without empirical grounding, nothing makes one distinction more meaningful than another.
What makes the "sweat" abstraction so special? Well, it's that we know about sweet receptors in the tongue and we know it's one of the four(five?) basic flavors because of that. I'm afraid you smuggle this knowledge into the pure qualia world. Without it, there is no preferable hierarchical relation and emergence becomes nonsensical again. There's just a field of qualia.
I don't understand your second part of the question regarding our "cognitive processes". Are you referring to our specific form of human consciousness ? I don't think this is only restricted to our human consciousness, for the reason that it happens to all qualia that we have. All qualia domains are structured in an emergent way.
I was referring to your observation that things lose meaning by repetition, like staring at yourself in the mirror for a long time. I to find this interesting, but I can imagine prosaic explanations. For example, that our brain requires a certain amount of variety in its inputs, otherwise it tends to a simpler state were apprehension of meaning is no longer possible. In other words, I am proposing a plumber-style explanation, and asking you why/if you think it can be discarded?
2) The main ideas in my book are the emergent structure of consciousness and the self-reference which gives birth to the emergent structure. The ideas about self-reference that I have are rooted in phenomenology. First I observe that consciousness is structured in an emergent way, and then I conclude that the reason it is like this is because there is an entity called "self-reference" that looks-back-at-itself and in this process includes the previously existing self and brings a new transcendent self into existence, like in the case of colors emerging on top of black-and-white.
I have the problem above with the first part of what you say, but I like the second part.
3) The difference is that in an emergent system you have top-down influence in levels. Electrons in simple systems like the ones in physical experiments have little input from any top level, so they behaving according to their own level and display certain laws. But when they are part of a greater holistic system, like in the brain (which is just an appearance of internal workings in consciousness) they receive top-down influence from the intentions in consciousness, and so they behave according to the will of consciousness. Is the same phenomenon when we speak, that I also gave in my presentation. When we speak, we act from the level of intending to transmit certain ideas. And this level exercises top-down influence in levels and the sentences, words and letters are coming out in accordance with the intention from the higher level.
Here I think you are making the ontological/epistemological confusion. Another way to describe what you are alluding to above is this: the more complex a system, the higher the amount of branching in the trees of causation that extend into the past. To describe the movement of an election in the ideal conditions of some laboratory experiment, you might just require a couple of equations and variables. To describe the movement of an election in the incredible wet mess that is the human brain, you require trillions of equations with trillions of variables.
The identification of patterns across scales allows us to vastly compress the information of the object we are looking at, making it somewhat tractable by our limited intellects. Some of these patters have names such as "speaking", "word", "presentation", "red", etc. These patterns are not arbitrarily grounded, they are grounded by some correspondence with qualia, as I argue above. Why? I don't have the answer, I think it's a mystery.
I am not saying that the point of view you describe above is not valid or interesting, but I am saying that it is nothing more than epistemology.