On 02 Oct 2013, at 06:56, Pierz wrote:
On Wednesday, October 2, 2013 12:46:17 AM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 01 Oct 2013, at 15:31, Pierz wrote:
> Maybe. It would be a lot more profound if we definitely *could*
> reproduce the brain's behaviour. The devil is in the detail as they
> say. But a challenge to Chalmer's position has occurred to me. It
> seems to me that Bruno has convincingly argued that *if* comp holds,
> then consciousness supervenes on the computation, not on the
> physical matter. But functionalism suggests that what counts is the
> output, not the manner in which it as arrived at. That is to say,
> the brain or whatever neural subunit or computer is doing the
> processing is a black box. You input something and then read the
> output, but the intervening steps don't matter. Consider what this
> might mean in terms of a brain.
That's not clear to me. The question is "output of what". If it is the
entie subject, this is more behaviorism than functionalism.
Putnam's functionalism makes clear that we have to take the output of
the neurons into account.
Comp is functionalism, but with the idea that we don't know the level
of substitution, so it might be that we have to take into account the
oputput of the gluons in our atoms (so comp makes clear that it only
ask for the existence of a level of substitution, and then show that
no machine can know for sure its subst. level, making Putnam's sort of
functionalism a bit fuzzy).
I was going on stathis's post. He stated that reproducing the
brain's functions meant reproducing the qualia, but I refuted that
(I think).
I am not entirely sure.
There is a problem as the notion of "reproducing brain's functions" is
ambiguous, and "reproducing qualia" is too.
> Let's say a vastly advanced alien species comes to earth. It looks
> at our puny little brains and decides to make one to fool us. This
> constructed person/brain receives normal conversational input and
> outputs conversation that it knows will perfectly mimic a human
> being. But in fact the computer doing this processing is vastly
> superior to the human brain. It's like a modern PC emulating a
> TRS-80, except much more so. When it computes/thinks up a response,
> it draws on a vast amount of knowledge, intelligence and creativity
> and accesses qualia undreamed of by a human. Yet its response will
> completely fool any normal human and will pass Turing tests till the
> cows come home. What this thought experiment shows is that, while
> half-qualia may be absurd, it most certainly is possible to
> reproduce the outputs of a brain without replicating its qualia. It
> might have completely different qualia, just as a very good actor's
> emotions can't be distinguished from the real thing, even though his
> or her internal experience is quite different. And if qualia can be
> quite different even though the functional outputs are the same,
> this does seem to leave functionalism in something of a quandary.
> All we can say is that there must be some kind of qualia occurring,
> rather a different result from what Chalmers is claiming. When we
> extend this type of scenario to artificial neurons or partial brain
> prostheses as in Chamer's paper, we quickly run up against
> perplexing problems. Imagine the advanced alien provides these
> prostheses. It takes the same inputs and generates the same correct
> outputs, but it processes those inputs within a much vaster, more
> complex system. Does the brain utilizing this advanced prosthesis
> experience a kind of expanded consciousness because of this, without
> that difference being detectable? Or do the qualia remain somehow
> confined to the prosthesis (whatever that means)? These crazy
> quandaries suggest to me that basically, we don't know shit.
Hmm, I am not convinced. "Chalmers argument" is that to get a
philosophical zombie, the fading argument shows that you have to go
through half-qualia, which is absurd. His goal (here) is to show that
"no qualia" is absurd.
That the qualia can be different is known in the qualia literature,
and is a big open problem per se. But Chalmers argues only that "no
qualia" is absurd, indeed because it would needs some absurd notion of
intermediate half qualia.
My be I miss a point. Stathis can clarify this furher.
Yes, I understand that to be Chalmer's main point. Although, if the
qualia can be different, it does present issues - how much and in
what way can it vary? I'm curious what the literature has to say
about that. And if functionalism means reproducing more than the
mere functional output of a system, if it potentially means
replication down to the elementary particles and possibly their
quantum entanglements, then duplication becomes impossible, not
merely technically but in principle. That seems against the whole
point of functionalism - as the idea of "function" is reduced to
something almost meaningless.
This shows only that computationalism admits a great variety of
possible practice corresponding to the level you bet on. Then it has
an entire "theology" with the Platonic God well approximated by the
notion of Truth (that we search and hope for, or fear, etc.).
Eventually the qualia is determined by infinitely many number
relations, and a brain filters them. It does not create them, like no
machine can create PI, only "re-compute" it, somehow. The anlogy here
break sown as qualia are purely first person notion, which explains
why they are distributed on the whole universal dovetailing (sigma_1
arithmetic).
I agree with Brent though on this. Your UDA proceeds on the basis
that a computer in a single reality (not an infinite sum of
calculations - that comes later) can have a 1p.
Yes. It has 1p, it is not a zombie. But that 1p, for him, is really
defined by a cloud of similar and variant corresponding to its
indeterminacy domain in the universal dovetailing (= already in a tiny
part of arithmetic).
Otherwise the steps of your argument can't proceed. And 1p entails
qualia. Your argument becomes circular.
?
Comp is an hypothesis about consciousness, as it postulates its
invariance for a serie of transformation.
Then the reasoning shows (at a meta-level, made possible with the
assumption used) how consciousness and beliefs (more or less deluded)
in physical realities develop in arithmetic.
But that's the mathematical (arithmetical) part. In UDA it is just
shown that if comp is true (an hypothesis on consciousness) then
physics is a branch of arithmetic. More precisely a branch of the
ideally self-referentially correct machine's theology. (always in the
Greek sense).
There is no pretense that comp is true, but if it is true, the correct
"QM" cannot postulate the wave, it has to derive the wave from the
numbers. That's what UDA shows: a problem. AUDA (the machine's
interview) provides the only path (by Gödel, Löb, Solovay) capable of
relating the truth and all machine's points of view.
There will be many ways to extract physics from the numbers, but
interviewing the self-introspecting universal machine is the only way
to get not just the laws of physics, but also why it can hurt, and why
a part of that seems to be necessarily not functional.
Bruno
Bruno
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
> send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
