On 04 Jun 2017, at 08:52, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Sure, we can take the same drug and talk about our experiences, and
conclude that they were similar. And they probably were. But
ultimately, there is a language grounding problem. We have no way of
comparing qualia, private experience. I cannot even verify
experimentally that you are indeed conscious. I assume it
heuristically, that's all.
OK. Let me tell you how I think about it, heuristically at least,
as you
say. From my first-personal perspective, 'you' - that is your body
- can
only ever be said to be "conscious' in the brutely covariate sense.
For that
matter, the same goes for my observation of my own body. As you
say, there's
no conceivable objective test that could establish more than this.
Nor - and
this is telling - would anything more than neurocognition, at least
in
principle, be required to account for your, or my own, observable
behaviour.
I agree.
I think we need to accept that this is indeed telling us something.
But
what? In my view it's telling us to stop thinking of consciousness
as being
'explained' exclusively with reference to its observable physical
correlates. IOW this is possibly a paradigm case of the distinction
between
correlation and causation.
Yes, this is all I'm saying too!
The alternative - shorn of its uniquely a
posteriori relation with one's own consciousness - would be in
effect simply
to accept that physical behaviour is its own 'explanation'. This is
the
conclusion Brent urges on us and I can respect this position
without being
content with it myself.
Right, I can also understand Brent's positions. One of the reasons why
I am not satisfied with such a position is that consciousness appears
to be unnecessary from an intelligence / Darwinian standpoint. It
appears that Darwinism + neuroscience/computer science can explain the
emergence of our behaviour in non-conscious zombies. It has been
argued that it could be a spandrel, a by-product of the evolutionary
process. I have no problem with that -- in fact I am betting this is
the case, because I doubt that a non-conscious human-level
intelligence is possible. But I still want to know why.
Every time a problem baffles us, and people suggest that: "look, it's
just a brute fact", I can't help but feel that this stance is very
akin to saying "the gods did it". One of the things I like about
Bruno's work is that I fell that he, at least, provides a theory on
why it looks so mysterious to us.
What also baffles me is why some people can't see the mystery. I don't
think this is the case with Brent though, I think he is a pragmatist
-- which is a perfectly reasonable thing to be.
To go beyond this, as for example Bruno is attempting to do with
the comp
theory, requires an explanatory schema that somehow manages both to
transcend and encapsulate the explication of conscious phenomena in
exclusively reductive terms. And to strip this move of any sense of
arbitrariness or avoidance of the problem we also need to show that
this is
a necessary consequence of situating those phenomena adequately
within a
tractable theory of knowledge. Such a theory will then focus on
explicating
a characteristic logic of consciousness in terms of what is
perceptible or
not, what is doubtable or not, what is communicable or not, and so
forth.
And of course a crucial component of this must be the relation of
these
categories to the dynamics of the necessarily correlated 'physics
of the
observable'.
Yes, this is something I would like to see Bruno talk about more: how
he hopes to derive physics from his theory.
By convincing courageous people to pursue the extraction of the
quantum logics from the arithmetical "material hypostases". This
means, notably, to optimize the theorem prover for G and G*, and the
variants.
We need "only" an army of mathematicians working in a department of
theology in some science academy ...
By UDA, the physical is given by, either Bp & p, or Bp & Dt, or Bp &
Dt & p. (anything giving Bp -> Dp, so that we have a notion of bet).
Normally the first person plural one should be the one given by Bp & Dt.
p is for sigma_1 proposition, the "leaves" of the universal
dovetailing, and B is for Gödel's beweisbar predicate, where all those
nuances are enforced by incompleteness theorem for any machine betting
on computationalism and trying to predict its consistent extension in
arithmetic.
We do have the three quantum logics, and their corresponding
quantization (the logic of []<>p, to "reverse" Goldblatt's translation
of the modal logic into quantum logic) gives the quantum relations,
from which it is hoped we get enough (we know we do get something
complete, in some sense) to get either Gleason theorem, or a
corresponding one.
The qualia should be given by S4Grz1 and X1* minus X1. But the quanta
are sort of qualia, partially sharable and seems to appear in the
three physics we get.
The logic with "Dt" (consistency) admits infinitely many weakening
(using DDt, DDt, DBDt, ...), giving graded version of those quantum
logics, and the space structure (gravity perhaps) should be related to
Temperley-Lieb algebra and knot invariant related to the graded
version of those logics. But here I have only conjecture.
We need also progress in the quantified version of G & variants, and
progress in the semantics (but there has been some progress in the
algebraic semantics, in Russia, and Georgia), notably very nice work
by Blok and Esapia. We are only at the beginning of the machine
interview.
Bruno
I have no problem with theories of mind,
but I am not sure that we can expect them to be validated or refuted
in the some way that other theories can be.
That's right. Not in the same way, but perhaps nonetheless, in
principle and
with justification, to the extent that it can be said to be
explained at
all.
Yes. In the end, some weirdness is to be expected. After all, the
attempt to understand consciousness amounts to something creating
theory on itself. After all, we only have the first-person view. The
third-person view of reality is an abstraction. Independently of one's
position on MWI, comp, physicalism, idealism, etc, one only knows
reality in the 1p. Trying to understand consciousness is trying to
understand 1p from the 1p. If logic has taught me anything, it's that
once you apply something to itself, strange things happen...
Indirect measures of consciousness entail hidden
assumptions, and it becomes easy to beg the question.
Which particular question did you have in mind?
For example: does consciousness in humans supervene only on brain
activity?
Well, in the terms I've set out: Yes if you you mean the
indispensable
necessity of covariance with the observable physics, which is to
say the
spectrum of perceptible externality and its theoretical ontology.
No if you
mean an explanatory theory of knowledge. In the latter sense it may
be said
to supervene on something explanatorily prior to the emergence of
both
'observation' and the 'observable', as for example in the comp
theory.
The usual method of detecting consciousness involve
monitoring brain activity, so they beg the question.
Does what I've said so far affect your possible view of the
situation in any
way?
Yes, I think you make an interesting distinction above. I think I
agree.
It's funny because I argue a lot with Brent on this, but I am not
opposed to pragmatism. I love AI, and would love to know more about
how to reach human-level-AI. But there is a deeper dissatisfaction
that I insist on, and others (perhaps more wisely) don't.
Telmo.
David
Telmo.
David
Telmo.
David
In my opinion this results from equating intelligence and human
experience with consciousness. Maybe that position is correct, but
nobody can claim to know if this is the case.
There is overwhelming evidence that the physical brain is a
computer,
capable of storing memories, detecting patterns, predicting the
future
and so on. It is also the case that human experience depends on
these
mechanisms. What there is no evidence for is what is conscious
or not.
For example, panpsychists hold that everything is conscious. I
don't
see how such a hypothesis can be falsified at the moment.
Telmo.
-- they move in
lockstep, so if your body has decohered having obtained a
particular
measurement result, all copies (if there be such) of this
consciousness
are
conscious of the same measurement result. By the identity of
indiscernibles,
there is then only one body and one consciousness. That is what
QM and
MWI
tell you, any deviations are simple fantasy.
Bruce
The apparent non-locality is then purely an artifact on making
such
assumptions about localization in branches when that's wrong
to do.
Saibal
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