On Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:40:49 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 15 Mar 2014, at 23:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: > http://www.jesseengland.net/index.php?/project/vide-uhhh/ > > > Have a look at this quick video (or get the idea from this_) > > Since the VCR can get video feedback of itself, is there any computational > reason why this doesn't count as a degree of self awareness? > > > The computational reason is that there is no computation at all there. > There is no self-representation, no introspection in the computer science > theoretical sense. >
How do you know though? This is the same argument that I give for machines, except I am saying that there is no introspection in the sense of aesthetic phenomenal sense. Maybe the VCR is just very young compared to the machines that you are used to considering as capable of self-representation - indeed the jumpy screen artifacts correlate perfectly with the events that are impacting the VCR's body. Notice how each operation performed on the 'VCS' (VCR + Camera System) generates a unique vocabulary of responses on the screen. Why not assume that these are intelligent cries which reflect specific mechanical emotions. If we reproduced the experiment on a variety of similar devices, we could probably deduce a mathematical schema - a language through which VCS' talk about themselves and their environment. We could interview them and see whether they follow computationalist expectations for UMs or LUMs. > > There is an interesting analogy, as the computational self-reference leads > to similar fixed points, but the analogy stops there. The VCR is like a > mirror, with some dynamical delay similar to a computer self-reference, but > it lacks the computations. Simply. > I think that you would have to be telepathic to say with certainty that it lacks computations, just as I would have to be telepathic to 'know' that a machine is not a p-zombie. Your argument is that the VCS is a an m-zombie. A mechanical zombie which only seems to respond to its own condition as if it were a machine's 1p. > > > > > Would VCRs which have 'seen themselves' in this way have a greater chance > of developing that awareness than those which have not? > > > No. > Not when you have ruled out their right to compute from the start ;) > > > If not, what initial conditions would be necessary for such an awareness > to develop in some machines and how would those initial conditions appear? > > > The VCR lacks the numbers, the digital information. It lack retrievable > memories, and well, the whole universality/Löbianity stuff. > Maybe its just very quiet about it. Any argument that you have used against my objections to computationalism can be used as effectively here to your objections to sub-computationalism. Craig > The VCR just singles out one aspect of digital machine self-reference, but > lacks the main part: the computations itself. > > How would those initial conditions appears? You can derive them from the > laws of addition + multiplication. > > 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 <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com<javascript:> > . > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > 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/d/optout.
