Yes, but its is to the other species benefit, in the genetic, Darwinian sense, to communicate and cut a deal! Perhaps, honey bees would be happy to cut a deal between their hives and humans, but so far no tweets from the bees, or the birds either. The smart but not conscious proposition seems akin to AI assistants. I don't see even a super SIRI in nature, so far. Could a crop someday be used as a means to pass electrons in a digital manner? Yes, but by humans or an AI. In a dream like future, our descendents can calculate, using cirro-cumulous clouds on a warm spring day, or the wind through the grass, or hopping rabbits. This sounds unlikely, but I am not ruling this out.
Nature, so far, doesn't pass the IQ test, with some human or AI intercession. There might be non relationship between consciousness and smartness. Of course we do have realtion, through the smells, and through the 02 / CO2 cycle. We, the animals, are already "hostage" of the plants, somehow. Even humans does not always listen to humans, so the absence of a dialog is not an argument of lack of individual consciousness. Bruno -----Original Message----- From: Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Wed, Sep 17, 2014 9:01 am Subject: Re: MGA revisited paper + supervenience On 16 Sep 2014, at 19:09, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote: If plants and ant colonies (animals) are so darn smart, one of their best moves would be to cut a deal with the human species, something mutually, beneficial. I hold that great silence indicates that no, plants and ants ain't that conscious. There might be non relationship between consciousness and smartness. Of course we do have realtion, through the smells, and through the 02 / CO2 cycle. We, the animals, are already "hostage" of the plants, somehow. Even humans does not always listen to humans, so the absence of a dialog is not an argument of lack of individual consciousness. Bruno Mitch -----Original Message----- From: Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Tue, Sep 16, 2014 12:21 pm Subject: MGA revisited paper + supervenience Hi Russell, Hi Others, Sorry for the delay. Some comments on your (Russell) MGA paper appear below. On 25 Aug 2014, at 00:30, Russell Standish wrote: > On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 01:22:51PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: >> On 8/24/2014 12:55 AM, Russell Standish wrote: >>>> >>> I don't think that can be the case. I don't see how it can be >>> anything >>> to be like a tree, yet trees are clearly DNA-based beings. So you >>> would get skewed results if you were to reason as though you could >>> be >>> a tree. >> >> Exactly. It's a reductio on the pattern of argument you used to >> prove ants can't be conscious. I used it to prove ants can't be DNA >> based. > > I don't understand. How is having DNA relevant to having > consciousness? It is quite plausible that non-DNA-based forms are > conscious (eg a computer running a suitable AI program), and that > some DNA-based forms are not conscious (trees, for example). I agree. Incidentally, when you see the complexity of the interaction between the roots of trees and the soils, chemicals and through bacteria, and when you believe, as some experiences suggest, that trees and plant communicate, I am not so sure if trees and forest, perhaps on different time scale, have not some awareness, and a self-awareness of some sort. (I take awareness as synonymous with consciousness, although I change my mind below!). > > >> >>> >>> The reference class cannot be larger than the class of conscious >>> beings. Obviously it can be quite a bit smaller, but there must be a >>> maximal reference class for which anthropic reasoning is valid, >>> although it is quite controversial what it is - some suggest it may >>> even be as small as those people capable of understanding the >>> anthropic argument, a sizable fraction of which inhabits this list! >> >> That's what bothers me. If you exclude ants because they're not >> conscious (and I assume you've read "Godel, Escher, and Bach") and >> hence can't understand the argument, why not exclude people who >> can't understand the argument? >> > > "Ant Fugue" is about the possibility that ant _colonies_ might be > conscious. My argument has nothing to say about ant colonies, even > though I consider "Ant Fugue" to be just an interesting speculation, > rather than a serious claim about ant colonies. I am a bit agnostic on this. But I have few doubt that individual ants have some consciousness, though. > > Oh - perhaps you mean "can't understand the argument" as in organisms > that can't understand the anthropic argument must be excluded from the > reference class. This seems a rather implausible claim - just because > anthropic argument has not occurred to you yet, shouldn't really > exclude you. The idea that self-awareness is a necessary requirement > of the reference class is a perhaps more believable claim - in order > to even > think anthropically requires a concept of self - but then I'm still > not sure what it even means to be conscious, but not self-aware. What > does it even mean to "be an amoeba", as Bruno seems to think is > possible. OK. I will make a try. Awareness in its most basic forms comes from the ability to distinguish a good feeling from a bad feeling. The amoeba, like us, knows (in a weak sense) that eating some paramecium is good, but that hot or to cold place are bad, and this makes it reacts accordingly with some high degrees of relative self-referential correctness. The genome of the amoeba, which is really a collection of cooperating many genomes (lot of "nucleus") is Turing universal or "complete", and the amoeba incarnates it relatively to her (our) probable lower substitution level (which defines by the FPI the physical reality). So she get a life, a first person life, of some sorts. Little consciousness, if you want, because from the first person view of the amoeba it is the whole big thing. The life of protozoans are similar to ours. They keep moving for eating, try to avoid the possible predators, get sleepy (very deeply so) when it get cold (the cell transforms into a sort of egg), and they really dislike when being eaten, and try to avoid it instinctively, but with a possible "bad" experience. here an amoeba eats two paramecia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvOz4V699gk Now, amoeba are universal, but not Löbian, and so they lack the Kp -> KKp law, and are not self-aware. Nor do have them memories, or only few one, so they live in the instant present, happy when eating, unhappy when being eaten. At least they will not philosophize and be unhappy when eating because they know they *might* be eaten, nor happy when being eaten because they got the point that it is part of the game of life and be serene about this, or because they believe in christ or someone. You need to be Löbian to develop those form of craziness. I think this came with lower invertebrate, like jumping spiders and cuttlefishes. But they are lucky, their brain are not enough big to develop much of the craziness. They probably live a little bit less in the present, but still don't get the point of the existential question. To be aware is to feel the cold, the hot, the yummy, the acidity level, and capable of interpreting it "self-referentially", and reacting. To be self-aware add the memories and one more reflexive loop (which you get in RA when adding the induction axioms, leading to PA). As long as you are correct, you obey the modal logic G and G* in that case. But the 1p views obeys the intensional variants. > > > >>> But that smacks of parochialism, much like the notion of >>> geocentrism. I just haven't found a convincing argument that the >>> maximal reference class is not just the class of conscious >>> organisms, >>> of beings for whom there is a something it is like to be. >>> >>> But my question (which you haven't answered) is what you think this >>> maximal reference class is from your four part classification of >>> consciousness. >> >> If I had to pick, I'd say it was those entities who were aware of >> their own thoughts and had sufficient language to formulate Bayesian >> inference. >> > > The Bayesian theory is a bit stringent don't you think. There are > plenty of formulations of the doomsday argument that don't use > Bayesian reasoning. Take Gott's version for example. > > Self-awareness, as I mentioned, is more defensible property. The > question is whether non-self-aware consciousness (your koi) is a > coherent concept. I agree that to have awareness, you need a self, a third person self. But that is well played by the relative body (actually bodies, incarnate through the UD). Maybe we should define consciousness by self-awareness, and then self- consciousness would be the higher form of self-self-awareness? That makes one "self" per reflexive loop. > > Attacks on anthropic reasoning will work better by choosing a > reference class which is indisputably a subset of the reference class, > such as all human beings, and then demonstrating a contradiction. I > thought I had come up with such an example with my "Chinese paradox", > but it turned out anthropic reasoning was rescued from that by the > peculiar distribution of country population sizes that happens to hold > in reality. AR has proved remakably resilient to empirical tests. I am still a bit agnostic for its use in the fundamentals, as the probability, with computationalism, are always relative. It is the same in quantum mechanics, where the probabilities are not on states, but on relative states: they have always the form <a I b>^2, the probability for finding b when being in the state a. But we can extract useful information from the Anthropic principle, and even from the most general Turing-thropic. Just saying that the laws of physics should be a calculus of relative probabilities. PS I have printed your MGA paper, and so read it and comment it despite being in a busy period. Let me say here, as we are in the good thread, two main points, where we might have vocabulary issue, or perhaps disagree on something? So you might think about this and be prepared :) The first point concerns the relation between counterfactualness and modal realism, that you link in a way which makes me a bit uneasy. I do believe in some links between them, though, but it might not correspond to yours. Examples will follow later. The second point is the one we have already discussed, and concerns the definition of supervenience. We do both agree on the Stanford definition, but I am still thinking you are misusing it when apply to the Alice and Bob in the classroom situation. You agree that C supervenes on B if to change C it is necessary to change B. For example, consciousness C supervenes on a brain activity B, because to change that consciousness you need to change that brain activity. Now take the (physical) union of B and A: B-and-A. If you change B, you automatically change B-and-A. So if consciousness C supervenes on B, you need to make a change to B- and-A (indeed to the B part), and so automatically C will supervenes on the union of B and A. So when Alice and Bob are in the classroom, we have that - Alice's consciousness supervenes on Alice's brain activity - Alice's consciousness supervenes on Alice + the entire room (including Bob's brain activity) - Bob consciousness supervenes on Bob's brain activity. - Bob consciousness supervenes on Bob + the entire room (including Alice's brain activity). It is not a problem that both Bob's and Alice's consciousness supervenes on the same classroom, as to make a change in either Alice or Bob's consciousness, you need to make a change of the A+B system. It is the same for UD*. My and your consciousness supervenes on UD*. To make a change to my or your's consciousness here and now, we would need to make the (impossible) change in the UD*. Are you OK with: (C supervenes on B) entails (C supervenes on B+D), with B+D being some physical union of B and some C. I have to go, sorry for the delays, and possible other delays. September-october are particularly heavy this year, but we have all the time, OK? Best, Bruno 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. -- 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. 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. -- 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.
