On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 12:55 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Say that you have been captured by the [totalitarian fiend of your choice],
> and are tied up in a basement somewhere. The torture has begun, and is has
> become clear that it will continue to get worse until you 'become one of
> them'.
>
> Fortunately you have been supplied by your team with a 'Chalmers' device,
> which allows you to know exactly what to say and do to convince your captors
> that you have turned and become 'one of them' in earnest. Using real-time em
> field sensitivity and quantum computing, the computational states are not
> only analyzed, but predicted for everyone in the room so that you are
> furnished with the best lines and gestures, sobbing, explaining, etc.
>
> The Chalmers device allows you to be a flawless actor. Is there any reason
> that this wouldn't work in theory? What law says that acting can only be so
> good, and beyond that you actually have to 'love Big Brother' in order to
> seem like you do? If we had a device that would allow us to control our
> bodies, emotions, and minds precisely and absolutely, why couldn't we use
> that device as a mask?
The perfect actor might believe it or he might just be acting. Acting
is top-down replacement, not bottom-up replacement. Bottom-up
replacement would involve replacing a part of your brain so that you
didn't notice any difference and no-one else noticed any difference.
> Part II
>
> Instead of replacing parts of the brain with perfect functional replicas,
> what if we used a hot wire to ablate or burn parts of the brain. If I burn
> one region, you lose the power of speech. If I burn another, you lose all
> understanding of physics and math. If I burn another, you go into a coma. I
> can do different combinations of ablation on different subjects, but would
> there be any case in which someone who was dead could be induced to speak or
> solve math problems? Why not? I could replace the motherboard of a burned
> out computer with any other compatible motherboard and expect to pick up
> right where I left off. If I toasted a critical part of any computer, there
> is no loss of potential functionality to any of the other parts, whether
> that part is implicated in the boot up process or not. Just because a
> computer won't boot doesn't mean that it can't be easily repaired. Not so
> with a living organism. If you blow out a simple power supply in a
> biological system, it will never run again - not even a little bit.
>
> What say ye?
Replacing body parts that break down with artificial ones is
well-established in the medical industry, and will become increasingly
so in future as the devices become more sophisticated.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
The perfect actor might believe it or he might just be acting. Acting
is top-down replacement, not bottom-up replacement. Bottom-up
replacement would involve replacing a part of your brain so that you
didn't notice any difference and no-one else noticed any difference.
Acting is an augmentation, not a replacement. It's a skill set. It involves a capacity to embody social expectations so that one's audience doesn't notice any difference. It's the same exact result from the third person view. An actor is a zombie being operated by a person.
Brent
--
Stathis Papaioannou
-- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html
On Thursday, September 27, 2012 11:05:20 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:On 9/27/2012 7:40 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:The perfect actor might believe it or he might just be acting. Acting
is top-down replacement, not bottom-up replacement. Bottom-up
replacement would involve replacing a part of your brain so that you
didn't notice any difference and no-one else noticed any difference.
Acting is an augmentation, not a replacement. It's a skill set. It involves a capacity to embody social expectations so that one's audience doesn't notice any difference. It's the same exact result from the third person view. An actor is a zombie being operated by a person.
The idea is to replace parts so that there is no behavior difference *under any circumstance* - acting, as you've conceived it, is limited to a particular situation.
If you understand my thought experiment than you would realize that this is the same thing. Just as a zombie arbitrarily asserts "no behavior difference *under any circumstance*", my acting service does exactly the same thing. It is a high technology simulation-prediction which augments rather than replaces the existing nervous system. My concept of acting is *specifically unlimited* and applies to all possible situations forever. That's what makes it a thought experiment.
You have to accept the premise of the thought experiment or else explain why the premise is unworkable (as I have done repeatedly with the zombie assumption).
Craig
Brent
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that has achieved computational universality because it learned how to process language.
It is because it can figure with symbols and representations that it can do what it does. This does not make it "special" in any miraculous way, it just shows us how Nature and its evolutionary ways is vastly more "intelligent" than we can possibly imagine ourselves to be.
On 9/27/2012 8:28 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, September 27, 2012 11:05:20 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:On 9/27/2012 7:40 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:The perfect actor might believe it or he might just be acting. Acting
is top-down replacement, not bottom-up replacement. Bottom-up
replacement would involve replacing a part of your brain so that you
didn't notice any difference and no-one else noticed any difference.
Acting is an augmentation, not a replacement. It's a skill set. It involves a capacity to embody social expectations so that one's audience doesn't notice any difference. It's the same exact result from the third person view. An actor is a zombie being operated by a person.
The idea is to replace parts so that there is no behavior difference *under any circumstance* - acting, as you've conceived it, is limited to a particular situation.
If you understand my thought experiment than you would realize that this is the same thing. Just as a zombie arbitrarily asserts "no behavior difference *under any circumstance*", my acting service does exactly the same thing. It is a high technology simulation-prediction which augments rather than replaces the existing nervous system. My concept of acting is *specifically unlimited* and applies to all possible situations forever. That's what makes it a thought experiment.
Then I would say it's not distinct from 'being'. It is no longer a choice, "I'm going to act." motivated by some particular situation.
On Thursday, September 27, 2012 11:56:58 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:On 9/27/2012 8:28 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, September 27, 2012 11:05:20 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:On 9/27/2012 7:40 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:The perfect actor might believe it or he might just be acting. Acting
is top-down replacement, not bottom-up replacement. Bottom-up
replacement would involve replacing a part of your brain so that you
didn't notice any difference and no-one else noticed any difference.
Acting is an augmentation, not a replacement. It's a skill set. It involves a capacity to embody social expectations so that one's audience doesn't notice any difference. It's the same exact result from the third person view. An actor is a zombie being operated by a person.
The idea is to replace parts so that there is no behavior difference *under any circumstance* - acting, as you've conceived it, is limited to a particular situation.
If you understand my thought experiment than you would realize that this is the same thing. Just as a zombie arbitrarily asserts "no behavior difference *under any circumstance*", my acting service does exactly the same thing. It is a high technology simulation-prediction which augments rather than replaces the existing nervous system. My concept of acting is *specifically unlimited* and applies to all possible situations forever. That's what makes it a thought experiment.
Then I would say it's not distinct from 'being'. It is no longer a choice, "I'm going to act." motivated by some particular situation.
You would be wrong. Acting is like any other capacity or skill. You can always choose not to act, but in this example, if you choose to, then nobody can tell the difference. You can exhibit the behaviors of a zombie at your discretion.
Then I would say it's not distinct from 'being'. It is no longer a choice, "I'm going to act." motivated by some particular situation.
Brent
Brent
Hi Craig,Are you saying that you expect replacing someone's brain would be no more problematic than replacing any other body part?
Craig
I kinda have to side with Stathis a bit here. The problem that you are hinging an argument on it merely technical, it is not principled. My opinion is that a neuron is vastly more complex in its structure than a transistor, heck its got its own power supply and repair system and more built in! Nature, if anything, is frugal, there would not be redundant stuff in a neuron such that we only need to replace some aspect of it in order to achieve functional equivalence.
The point is that the brain is a specialized biological computer
Yes and no. It is biological and one of the things that it does is compute, but computation is not sufficient to describe the brain (or any organic cell, tissue, or system).
that has achieved computational universality because it learned how to process language.
The role of language is controversial. It's important, no doubt, but it isn't clear that human language is the killer app that enabled the rise of Homo sapiens. We don't really know which organisms have language, nor can we say for sure that any species has no language as far as I can tell. Quorum sensing is bacterial language. Prairie dogs have language, birds, crickets, trees. It depends how we define it.
It is because it can figure with symbols and representations that it can do what it does. This does not make it "special" in any miraculous way, it just shows us how Nature and its evolutionary ways is vastly more "intelligent" than we can possibly imagine ourselves to be.
I agree it's not special in any miraculous way. I have never advocated human exceptionalism.
What does that have to do with acting being a perfectly appropriate counterfactual for the zombie assumption?
On 9/27/2012 11:57 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Hi Craig,Are you saying that you expect replacing someone's brain would be no more problematic than replacing any other body part?
Craig
I kinda have to side with Stathis a bit here. The problem that you are hinging an argument on it merely technical, it is not principled. My opinion is that a neuron is vastly more complex in its structure than a transistor, heck its got its own power supply and repair system and more built in! Nature, if anything, is frugal, there would not be redundant stuff in a neuron such that we only need to replace some aspect of it in order to achieve functional equivalence.
The point is that the brain is a specialized biological computer
Yes and no. It is biological and one of the things that it does is compute, but computation is not sufficient to describe the brain (or any organic cell, tissue, or system).
Hi Craig,
I agree. It does not "just compute".
that has achieved computational universality because it learned how to process language.
The role of language is controversial. It's important, no doubt, but it isn't clear that human language is the killer app that enabled the rise of Homo sapiens. We don't really know which organisms have language, nor can we say for sure that any species has no language as far as I can tell. Quorum sensing is bacterial language. Prairie dogs have language, birds, crickets, trees. It depends how we define it.
Any representational and (at least potentially) sharable form of interaction is language, in my thinking.
It is because it can figure with symbols and representations that it can do what it does. This does not make it "special" in any miraculous way, it just shows us how Nature and its evolutionary ways is vastly more "intelligent" than we can possibly imagine ourselves to be.
I agree it's not special in any miraculous way. I have never advocated human exceptionalism.
I do advocate it. Humans are exceptional if merely because we can make the claim and make attempts to demonstrate the possibility! The fact that we can question whether we are or not and seek answers to the question of consciousness, is exceptional!
What does that have to do with acting being a perfectly appropriate counterfactual for the zombie assumption?
My point about zombies is that if we are going to stipulate their existence as being exactly like humans except that they have no qualia (first person percepts and all that), then we have to be consistent to the definition in our discussions of them.
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On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The principle is not the same. You cannot get a head transplant and assume
> that the 'you'-ness is going to magically follow the scalpel into your head
> from your body. You cannot get a prosthetic head, because without a head,
> there is no 'you' there anymore.
What test do you use to determine if it is still you after a certain
procedure?
For example, someone could claim that photographing a
person destroys their soul, and they are no longer the same person. I
would point out that they behave like the same person and seem to
honestly believe that they are the same person, but the
counterargument is that this counts for nothing, since this would be
true of an identical copy and the original person would be dead.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
--
Stathis Papaioannou
--
Stathis Papaioannou
I don't doubt that initial experiments would not yield ideal results. Neural prostheses would initially be used for people with disabilities. Cochlear implants are better than being deaf, but not as good as normal hearing. But technology keeps getting better while the human body stays more or less static, so at some point technology will match and then exceed it. At the very least, there is no theoretical reason why it should not.
-- Onward! Stephen
-- Onward! Stephen
the point at which — given an error — you, as the programmer, can say it made a mistake."
If an implanted device doesn't make mistakes, it isn't human intelligence. If it does make mistakes, it has to make the kinds of mistakes that humans can tolerate...the mistakes have to be sourced in the same personal agendas of living beings.
Craig
--
Stathis Papaioannou
On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 11:45 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> You're suggesting that even if one implant works as well as the
>> original, multiple implants would not. Is there a critical replacement
>> limit, 20% you feel normal but 21% you don't? How have you arrived at
>> this insight?
>
>
> If you have one brain tumor, you may still function. With multiple tumors,
> you might not fare as well. Tumors function fine on some levels (they are
> living cells successfully dividing) but not on others (they fail to stop
> dividing, perhaps because there is a diminished identification with the
> sense of the organ as a whole).
>
> Because we are 100% ignorant of any objective ontology of consciousness,
> there is no reason to assume that an implant can possibly function well
> enough to act as a replacement on all levels, unless possibly if the implant
> was made of one's own stem cells (probably the best avenue to pursue).
You're not really answering the question. The neural implants are
refined to the point where thousands of people are walking around with
them with no problem. Any objective or subjective test thrown at them
they pass. There are implants available for every part of the brain.
You're saying that if someone has 12 implants of the best possible
design they will be fine, but when they get 13 they will start to act
strangely.
How can you know that this will happen?
You're not just
saying here that it would be technically difficult, you're saying that
it would be *impossible* for the implants to work properly. So what
physical law that you know about and no-one else does would be broken?
--
Stathis Papaioannou
--
Stathis Papaioannou
On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 5:21 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> But if the implants worked as implants without experiences the person
>> would behave as if everything were fine while internally and
>> impotently noticing that his experiences were disappearing or
>> changing. Do you understand what this means?
>
>
> I understand exactly what you think it means, but you don't understand why
> the theoretical assumption doesn't apply to reality. Where consciousness is
> concerned, the whole is not merely the sum of its parts, or even greater
> than the sum of it's parts, it is *other than* the sum of it's parts. If the
> parts are not genetically identical to the whole, then they cannot be
> expected to even create a sum, let alone produce an experience which is
> greater or other than that sum. You assume that personal experience is a sum
> of impersonal mechanisms, whereas I understand that is not the case at all.
> Impersonal mechanisms are the public back end of sub-personal experiences.
And if that were the case you would get a person who would behave as
if everything were fine while internally and impotently noticing that
his experiences were disappearing or changing. Do you understand why
he would behave as if everything were fine?
Do you understand why he
would internally and impotently notice that his experiences were
disappearing or changing?
> If you try to build a person from mechanisms, you will *always fail*,
> because the sub-personal experiences are not accessible without the personal
> experiences to begin with. A baby has to learn to think like an adult
> through years of personal experience. It is the actual subjective
> participation in the experiences which drives how the neurology develops. We
> see this with how people blind from birth use their visual cortex for
> tactile experience. If you gave the blind person a drug with will make their
> visual cortex function just like a sighted person's, they still won't get
> any colors. The colors aren't in 'there', there in 'here'.
The problem with someone blind from birth who later has an optical
problem corrected in adulthood is that the visual cortex has not
developed properly, since this normally happens in infancy.
Thus to make them see you would need not only to correct the optical problem
but to rewire their brain. If you could do that then they would have
all the required apparatus for visual perception and they would be
able to see.
This is trivially obvious to me and most people: you
can't see because your brain doesn't work, and if you fixed the brain
you would be able to see.
But I'm guessing that you might say that
even if the blind person's eyes and brain were fixed, so that
everything seemed to work perfectly well, they would still be blind,
because the non-mechanistic non-reducible spirit of visual essence
would be missing.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
--
Onward!
Stephen
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Stephen (and Bruno?)What I called The Aris - Total - meaning Aristotle's maxim that the 'whole' is bigger than the sum of its parts - means something else in MY agnosticism. Originally I included only the fact what Bruno pointed out now: that the PARTS (as accounted for) develop relations (qualia) adding to the totality they participate in. Lately, however, I added to my view that beyond the accountable parts (forget now the relations) there are participant 'inconnu'-s from outside our (inventoried) model knowable as of yesterday. So whatever we take inventory of is an (accountable) partial only.Beyond that - of course - Aristotle's 'total' ("material parts only") of his inventory was truly smaller than the above TOTAL in its entire complexity.The fact that complexity-parts extracted, or replaced may not discontinue the function of the 'total' is my problem with death: how to identify THOSE important components which are inevitable for maintaining the function as was?(Comes back to my negative attitude towards transport - hype (to Moscow, or another planet/universe) - complexity has uncountable connections in the infinite relations. How much could we possibly include (in our wildest fantasy) into the tele-transporting of a "person" (or whatever) so that the original functionality should be still detectable?)
Stephen (and Bruno?)What I called The Aris - Total - meaning Aristotle's maxim that the 'whole' is bigger than the sum of its parts - means something else in MY agnosticism. Originally I included only the fact what Bruno pointed out now: that the PARTS (as accounted for) develop relations (qualia) adding to the totality they participate in. Lately, however, I added to my view that beyond the accountable parts (forget now the relations) there are participant 'inconnu'-s from outside our (inventoried) model knowable as of yesterday. So whatever we take inventory of is an (accountable) partial only.Beyond that - of course - Aristotle's 'total' ("material parts only") of his inventory was truly smaller than the above TOTAL in its entire complexity.The fact that complexity-parts extracted, or replaced may not discontinue the function of the 'total' is my problem with death: how to identify THOSE important components which are inevitable for maintaining the function as was?(Comes back to my negative attitude towards transport - hype (to Moscow, or another planet/universe) - complexity has uncountable connections in the infinite relations. How much could we possibly include (in our wildest fantasy) into the tele-transporting of a "person" (or whatever) so that the original functionality should be still detectable?)Heavenly afterlife anybody?John Mikes
On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 11:57 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:
On 10/1/2012 1:00 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Physiological realities are mechanistic. Biologists and doctors are
mechanists. Even if you claim that "the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts" that does not mean that if yoyu replace the parts the
whole will stop working.
Yes. Anti-mechanist often refer to "the whole is bigger than the parts", but nowhere else than in computer and engineering is it more true that the whole is bigger than the part, if only because the whole put some specific structure on the relation between parts.
We might simplify this by saying that the whole *structural complexity* grows like an exponential (or more) when the whole cardinality grows linearly.
H Bruno,
Could you source some further discussions of this idea? From my own study of Cantor's tower of infinities, I have found the opposite, complexity goes to zero as the cardinals lose the ability to be named.
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-- Onward! Stephen
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Stephen:are you compofrtable to imagine yourSELF and the warehouse of your MEMORIES - all excluding any relations to your body?Then what? I think the complexity "WE" includes the part thought of as body and bodily feelings so an abstract transport would not result in 'ourselves'.Even the (oriental) 'experts' in reincarnation deny memories of the previous format. The 'ant' does not remember what kind of 'man' he was, nor does a 'man' remember his former life-form.Why should the 'expert' teleportation differ?JM
On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 8:50 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:
On 10/2/2012 5:57 PM, John Mikes wrote:
Hi John,Stephen (and Bruno?)What I called The Aris - Total - meaning Aristotle's maxim that the 'whole' is bigger than the sum of its parts - means something else in MY agnosticism. Originally I included only the fact what Bruno pointed out now: that the PARTS (as accounted for) develop relations (qualia) adding to the totality they participate in. Lately, however, I added to my view that beyond the accountable parts (forget now the relations) there are participant 'inconnu'-s from outside our (inventoried) model knowable as of yesterday. So whatever we take inventory of is an (accountable) partial only.Beyond that - of course - Aristotle's 'total' ("material parts only") of his inventory was truly smaller than the above TOTAL in its entire complexity.The fact that complexity-parts extracted, or replaced may not discontinue the function of the 'total' is my problem with death: how to identify THOSE important components which are inevitable for maintaining the function as was?(Comes back to my negative attitude towards transport - hype (to Moscow, or another planet/universe) - complexity has uncountable connections in the infinite relations. How much could we possibly include (in our wildest fantasy) into the tele-transporting of a "person" (or whatever) so that the original functionality should be still detectable?)Heavenly afterlife anybody?John Mikes
"Aris", I like it! One question is how much of one's sense of self and memories can be carried across. Function does not seem to do this alone as it is completely independent of the physical "body".
On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 11:57 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:
On 10/1/2012 1:00 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Physiological realities are mechanistic. Biologists and doctors are
mechanists. Even if you claim that "the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts" that does not mean that if yoyu replace the parts the
whole will stop working.
Yes. Anti-mechanist often refer to "the whole is bigger than the parts", but nowhere else than in computer and engineering is it more true that the whole is bigger than the part, if only because the whole put some specific structure on the relation between parts.
We might simplify this by saying that the whole *structural complexity* grows like an exponential (or more) when the whole cardinality grows linearly.
H Bruno,
Could you source some further discussions of this idea? From my own study of Cantor's tower of infinities, I have found the opposite, complexity goes to zero as the cardinals lose the ability to be named.
-- Onward! Stephen