On 31 Aug 2015, at 00:42, Russell Standish wrote:
On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 12:34:18PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 30 Aug 2015, at 03:08, Russell Standish wrote:
Well as people probably know, I don't believe C. elegans can be
conscious in any sense of the word. Hell - I have strong doubts
about
ants, and they're massively more complex creatures.
I think personally that C. Elegans, and Planaria (!), even amoeba,
are conscious, although very plausibly not self-conscious.
I tend to think since 2008 that even RA is already conscious, even
maximally so, and that PA is already as much self-conscious than a
human (when in some dissociative state).
But I don't know if PA is more or less conscious than RA. That
depends of the role of the higher part of the brain consists in
filtering consciousness or enacting it.
But it probably won't be long before we simulate a mouse brain in
toto
- about 2 decades is my guess, maybe even less given enough
dollars -
then we're definitely in grey philosophical territory :).
I am slightly less optimistic than you. It will take one of two
decades before we simulate the hippocampus of a rat, but probably
more time will be needed for the rest of their brain. And the result
can be a conscious creature, with a quite different consciousness
that a rat, as I find plausible that pain are related to the glial
cells and their metabolism, which are not taken into account by the
current "copies".
What is blocking us is not the computing power - already whole "rat
brain" simulations have been done is something like 1/10000 of real
time - so all we need is about a decade of performane improvement
through Moores law.
What development is needed is ways of determining the neural
circuitry. There have been leaps and bounds in the process of slicing
frozen brains, and imaging the slices with electron microscopes, but
clearly it is still far too slow.
As for the hypothesis that glial cells have something to do with it,
well that can be tested via the sort of whole rat brain simulation
I've been talking about. Run the simulation in a robotic rat, and
compare the behaviour with a real rat. Basically what the open worm
guys a doing, but scaled up to a rat. If the simulation is way
different from the real rat, then we know something else is required.
I can imagine that the rat will have a "normal behavior", but as he
cannot talk to us, we might fail to appreciate some internal change or
even some anosognosia. The rat would not be a zombie rat, but still be
in a quite different conscious state (perhaps better, as it seems the
glial cell might have some role in the chronic pain.
One intersting test I'd like to see is applying Tononi's integrated
information measure to these simple creatures to see if they're
producing any integrated information. I suspect Integrated
Information
is a necessary requirement for conscious, but not so sure about
sufficiency.
It is offred freely with the notion of self-reference, I would say.
The eight hypostases/persons-pov constitute each a different mode of
the self-integration. If Kauffman's idea that the DNA results from
something akin to Kleene's diagonalization (which I think too) the
amoeba and most protozoans are already quite self-integrated being.
Then elementary invertebrates might loose that integration (like
perhaps hydra), but quickly get it back, like with planaria.
You might be right that integrated information can be obtained from
your hypostases, but it is not obvious. More work is required before
you can plausibly make that claim.
Why? I think that by using the self-reference logic, we start from an
integrated whole.
I guess that you remember that I am not yet convinced by your
argument that ants are not conscious, as it relies on anthropic use
of the Absolute Self-Sampling Assumption (ASSA) which I prefer to
avoid because the domain of its statistic is not clear to me. (I am
not impressed by the doomsday argument for the same reason).
Yes, I've heard that a lot. "I'm not impressed" = "It sounds like a
crock of shit, but I can't put my finger on why".
Probably the best way forward is to put forward a toy model showing
the anthropic argument failing, and then the mechanism is clear.
It does not fail. It can explain some of the geography by bayesian
reasoning, but it can't explain the difference between physical laws,
and local physical/geographical fact. For the lwas, we have to find
something which does not depend on anything particular above being
Turing universal or Löbian.
Bruno
--
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Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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