On 9/24/2012 2:07 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 23 Sep 2012, at 18:33, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 23.09.2012 16:51 Bruno Marchal said the following:
On 23 Sep 2012, at 09:31, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 22.09.2012 22:49 meekerdb said the following:
...
In the past, Bruno has said that a machine that understands
transfinite induction will be conscious. But being conscious
and intelligent are not the same thing.
Brent
In my view this is the same as epiphenomenalism. Engineers develop
a robot to achieve a prescribed function. They do not care about
consciousness in this respect. Then consciousness will appear
automatically but the function developed by engineers does not
depend on it. Hence epiphenomenalism seems to apply.
Not at all. Study UDA to see why exactly, but if comp is correct,
consciousness is somehow what defines the physical realities, making
possible for engineers to build the machines, and then
consciousness, despite not being programmable per se, does have a
role, like relatively speeding up the computations. Like "non free
will", the "epiphenomenalism" is only "apparent" because you take
the "outer god's eyes view", but with comp, there is no matter, nor
consciousness, at that level, and we have no access at all at that
level (without assuming comp, and accessing it intellectually, that
is only arithmetic).
This is hard to explain if you fail to see the physics/machine's
psychology/theology reversal. You are still (consciously or not)
maintaining the physical supervenience thesis, or an aristotelian
ontology, but comp prevents this to be possible.
Bruno,
I have considered a concrete case, when engineers develop a robot, not a general one.
For such a concrete case, I do not understand your answer.
I have understood Brent in such a way that when engineers develop a robot they must
just care about functionality to achieve and they can ignore consciousness at all.
Whether it appears in the robot or not, it is not a business of engineers. Do you agree
with such a statement or not?
In my defense, I only said that the engineers could develop artificial intelligences
without considering consciousnees. I didn't say they *must* do so, and in fact I think
they are ethically bound to consider it. John McCarthy has already written on this years
ago. And it has nothing to do with whether supervenience or comp is true. In either case
an intelligent robot is likely to be a conscious being and ethical considerations arise.
Brent
The robot might disagree.
You might disagree, if you get a digital brain, and that people torture you on the
pretext that you are a zombie.
And you are right, we can dismiss consciousness. We have already dismissed emotion and
feelings with human slaves for a very long time. That does not mean those slaves were
not conscious, and that consciousness has no role.
If you want a robot or slave with flexible high cognitive capacities, I doubt that it
can harbor a mind without consciousness, which is just when the robot infers
(interrogates) its own sanity/consistency, and get aware of its non communicable but
"known" features.
Then with comp, you cannot understand where matter comes from without using the concept
of consciousness or at least its approximation through most first person notions, like
personal memories access, belief, knowledge, sensations, etc.
You don't need to understand nor even believe in the Higgs boson to do a pizza, but if
the standard model is correct, then there would be no pizza at all without it.
If you adopt an instrumental policy, you can evacuate *all* questionings, but when
generalized, this attitude leads people to depression and sense crisis, and lack of
meaning crisis, and disgust of science. To separate science from spirituality can only
lead to technological idolatry in the hands of barbarians. Individuals becomes
functional objects. That means suffering and death of humanity.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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