Re: Asifism
What is the subjective experience then? On 6/8/07, Torgny Tholerus [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Quentin Anciaux skrev: On Friday 08 June 2007 17:37:06 Torgny Tholerus wrote: What is the problem? If a computer behaves as if it knows anything, what is the problem with that? That type of behaviour increases the probability for the computer to survive, so the natural selection will favour that type of behaviour. I claim that if it behaves as if, then it means it has consciousness... Philosophical zombie (which is what it is all about) are not possible... If it is impossible to discern it with what we define as conscious (and when I say impossible, I mean there exists no test that can show between the presuposed zombie and a conscious being a difference of behavior) then there is no point whatsover you can say to prove that one is conscious and one is not. Either both are conscious or both aren't... While you say you're not conscious... I am, therefore you're conscious. The question, as I see it, is if there is anything more than just atoms reacting with each other in our brains. I claim that there is not anything more. The atoms reacting with each other explain fully my (and your...) behaviour. Our brains are very complicated structures, but it is nothing supernatural with them. Physics explains everything. -- Torgny Tholerus -- Mohsen Ravanbakhsh, --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Asifism
Le 08-juin-07, à 18:39, Jef Allbright a écrit : While I would point out that physics cannot possibly explain everything, being a necessarily constrained subjective model of reality, I would like to reinforce the point about consciousness. Consciousness certainly exists, as a description relating a set of observations having to do with subjective awareness, but there is nothing requiring that we assign it the status of an ontological entity. The importance of being precise! Now I agree with you, although I did disagree with your answer to Torgny. BTW distinguishing subjective awareness and consciousness is a 1004-fallacy ... at this stage. Also, to say that consciousness exists as a description could be misleading. It could exist as a phenomenon. I don't believe that people in this list would take consciousness as a primary reality, except perhaps those who singles out the third universal soul hypostasis (the first person, alias the one described by Bp p in the lobian interview) like George Levy, David, etc. With comp neither matter nor mind can be taken as primitive or primary reality. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Attempt toward a systematic description
Le 08-juin-07, à 20:17, Tom Caylor a écrit : I should respond to your response. I'm in a busy pensive state lately, reading Theaetetus (as you suggested on the Incompleteness thread) along with Protagoras and some Aristotle (along with the dozen other books I'm always reading...) in the little time I have. Take your time I will be extremely busy the next two weeks (exams and then Siena Cie 2007). But you do make assumptions as part of the comp hypothesis, including assumptions about numbers. I just assume the validity of the excluded middle principle on purely arithmetical question. If you prefer I just assume that if you run a machine then either that machine will stop or it will run forever. I don't know anyone not believing in this, but I have to make it as an assumption because I can not prove it from less, and I use it in the proofs. In the same spirit I assume 0 is not the successor of a positive integer, etc. (I reason axiomatically). Some technics can make this hypothesis weaker though. LRA looks to be about the particulars of arithmetic. PA, with induction, is trying to generalize to come up with some universal truths about arithmetic. About numbers, ok. But LRA has access to only one particular truth at a time, with no awareness of generalities/universals. Just few of them. OK. LRA is, like PA, under the godelian limitation joug. Only, PA knows it! Lobian machine, like PA or ZF, are godel-limited, but they are aware of their limitation. OK? So PA has this awareness, by *definition*. Not by definition at all! Showing this is the difficult part of Godel's second incompleteness theorem. It is done for the first time in some ugly way by Ackerman and Hilbert in their *Grundlagen*. It is the work of Lob which has made possible to do it in a beautiful way, and this has been a key step to the discovery of the modal logics G and G*, which formalizes completely the propositional logic of self-reference. It is a useful *tool* in mathematics, but you are assuming it is a part of reality at the deepest level. This is part your Arithmetic Realism part of the comp hyp, is it not? No. I consider PA as a clever being, a sort of *baby God* like any of us could hope to be (with comp). PA is just a universal machine knowing that she is universal (in a weak and precise sense). That is, PA is what I call a lobian machine. In some sense, PA is a turing machine having already the cognitive abilities to begin being anxious about the length of its available tape. This is because even the statement 1+2=2+1 is a Plato-like statement. The Aristotle verification would be to take 1 object and then take 2 more objects and count the group as a whole. Then take 2 objects and then 1 object and count the group as a whole. But, first of all, there are at least conceptually a (at least potentially) infinite number of objects you could use for this experiment, and you could do the experiment as an observer from an infinite number of angles/perspectives. Plus, a difference in perspective could make it so that you are taking the objects in a different order and so invalidate the experiment. I don't know what the implication is here other than there are very fundamental philosophical assumptions to deal with here. This is even without bringing multiplication into the picture. It seems, if you are going to base your reality on math, that these kinds of questions aren't unimportant because they remind me of the fundamental problems at the base of the quantum versus relativity. I cannot comment because it is a bit vague for me. Normally I can not address physical question before getting the comp-physics. Bruno The above does not require physical reality, but only concepts that we can think about looking inward (eyes closed view). But even though it is only conceptual, my point is that we are taking a leap of faith even when we talk about 1+1=2, classifying an infinite number of cases into one equivalence class. Not at all. This could appears in engineering when you apply a theory, not when you do math. 1+1 = 2 means what you have learn in high school where the mathematical structure written (N, 0, +, x) by algebraic minded people has been introduced to you. 1+1 = 2 can be false in many mathematical striucture. But then they admit other and different axiomatics. Thanks to the *completeness theorem of Godel what can be proved by PA is true in ALL mathematical structure which verifies the axioms of PA. But there is no machine which can prove all what is true in the standard model (N, 0, +, x), which escapes all machine and all theories. Perhaps at the core of this issue is whether things like + are prescriptive or descriptive. Is it possible that there are universes with mathematical white rabbits such that when you take 1 thing and 1 other thing (physical or not) and associate them in any
Re: Penrose and algorithms
Hi Chris, Le 09-juin-07, à 13:03, chris peck a écrit : Hello The time has come again when I need to seek advice from the everything-list and its contributors. Penrose I believe has argued that the inability to algorithmically solve the halting problem but the ability of humans, or at least Kurt Godel, to understand that formal systems are incomplete together demonstrate that human reason is not algorithmic in nature - and therefore that the AI project is fundamentally flawed. What is the general consensus here on that score. I know that there are many perspectives here including those who agree with Penrose. Are there any decent threads I could look at that deal with this issue? All the best Chris. This is a fundamental issue, even though things are clear for the logicians since 1921 ... But apparently it is still very cloudy for the physicists (except Hofstadter!). I have no time to explain, but let me quote the first paragraph of my Siena papers (your question is at the heart of the interview of the lobian machine and the arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus). But you can find many more explanation in my web pages (in french and in english). In a nutshell, Penrose, though quite courageous and more lucid on the mind body problem than the average physicist, is deadly mistaken on Godel. Godel's theorem are very lucky event for mechanism: eventually it leads to their theologies ... The book by Franzen on the misuse of Godel is quite good. An deep book is also the one by Judson Webb, ref in my thesis). We will have the opportunity to come back on this deep issue, which illustrate a gap between logicians and physicists. Best, Bruno -- (excerp of A Purely Arithmetical, yet Empirically Falsifiable, Interpretation of Plotinus¹ Theory of Matter Cie 2007 ) 1) Incompleteness and Mechanism There is a vast literature where G odel¹s first and second incompleteness theorems are used to argue that human beings are different of, if not superior to, any machine. The most famous attempts have been given by J. Lucas in the early sixties and by R. Penrose in two famous books [53, 54]. Such type of argument are not well supported. See for example the recent book by T. Franzen [21]. There is also a less well known tradition where G odel¹s theorems is used in favor of the mechanist thesis. Emil Post, in a remarkable anticipation written about ten years before G odel published his incompleteness theorems, already discovered both the main ³G odelian motivation² against mechanism, and the main pitfall of such argumentations [17, 55]. Post is the first discoverer 1 of Church Thesis, or Church Turing Thesis, and Post is the first one to prove the first incompleteness theorem from a statement equivalent to Church thesis, i.e. the existence of a universalPost said ³complete²normal (production) system 2. In his anticipation, Post concluded at first that the mathematician¹s mind or that the logical process is essentially creative. He adds : ³It makes of the mathematician much more than a clever being who can do quickly what a machine could do ultimately. We see that a machine would never give a complete logic ; for once the machine is made we could prove a theorem it does not prove²(Post emphasis). But Post quickly realized that a machine could do the same deduction for its own mental acts, and admits that : ³The conclusion that man is not a machine is invalid. All we can say is that man cannot construct a machine which can do all the thinking he can. To illustrate this point we may note that a kind of machine-man could be constructed who would prove a similar theorem for his mental acts.² This has probably constituted his motivation for lifting the term creative to his set theoretical formulation of mechanical universality [56]. To be sure, an application of Kleene¹s second recursion theorem, see [30], can make any machine self-replicating, and Post should have said only that man cannot both construct a machine doing his thinking and proving that such machine do so. This is what remains from a reconstruction of Lucas-Penrose argument : if we are machine we cannot constructively specify which machine we are, nor, a fortiori, which computation support us. Such analysis begins perhaps with Benacerraf [4], (see [41] for more details). In his book on the subject, Judson Webb argues that Church Thesis is a main ingredient of the Mechanist Thesis. Then, he argues that, given that incompleteness is an easyone double diagonalization step, see aboveconsequence of Church Thesis, G odel¹s 1931 theorem, which proves incompleteness without appeal to Church Thesis, can be taken as a confirmation of it. Judson Webb concludes that G odel¹s incompleteness theorem is a very lucky event for the mechanist philosopher [70, 71]. Torkel Franzen, who concentrates mainly on the negative (antimechanist in general) abuses of G odel¹s theorems, notes, after
Re: Asifism
SP: 'I've seen quite a few deluded people who believe that they are dead, but no-one who thinks they're unconscious...' MP: There is possibly a loose end or two here and perhaps clarification is needed, yet again: * It may well be that history is in the making, Torgny Tholerus is breaking new ground with Earth shaking results [sorry :-], and kudos will be yours if you can book him in first for a consultation [or dissection if it comes to that]. * Or this could conceivably be construed as a 'state of grace' in that Torgny is operating with no mental capacity being wasted on self-talk or internal commentary: 'just doing' whatever needs to be done and 'just being' what he needs to be; very Zen! * Then again it may be that I have misunderstood TT's grammar and that what he is denying is simply the separate existence of something called 'consciousness'. If that be the case then I would not argue because I agree that the subjective impression of being here now is simply what it is like to be part of the processing the brain does, ie updating the model of self in the world. * But I agree also that you are highly unlikely to come across someone who can truthfully say 'I am not conscious'. It seems totally self-contradictory: for example a person not just with 'hemi' neglect, but total neglect. How could such a person encounter themselves or the world? Or is there the possibility of something like so-called blindsight in every sensory modality? For example: deaf-hearing, numb-sensing, proprio-non-ception? This would imply a zombie [without 'a life'] which survived by making apparently random guesses about everything yet getting significantly more than chance success in each modality. A scary thought! Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 09/06/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:' What is the philosophical term for persons like me, that totally deny the existence of the consciousness?' MP: I think the word you are looking for is deluded. I've seen quite a few deluded people who believe that they are dead, but no-one who thinks they're unconscious... something to keep an eye out for. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Asifism
Mark, you put your finger usually on the 'not-so-obvious' (but relevant). I confess to not having memorized all the posts concerning conscious(ness?) on this list since 1996 or so, but looked up the topic prior to that. I found a historically developing noumenon, unidentified and a loose cannon, everybody including whatever he needed for his theoretical justification, some only static (awareness, etc.) some also dynamic (control of life-processes), as our enriching cognitive inventory served the theorists over the past 3000 years. I tried to generalize the concept and posted my result several times here and elsewhere. (Responding to information, i.e. to perception of a difference not only human not only even mental,). Important is that 'conscious' (especially of) is NOT the adjective for consciousness, which in turn is NOT the opposite of 'unconscious(ness)'. Do we have this involved discussion, because we did not agree what we are talking about? Do we agree in What is a ZOMBIE? the fictional figment that does not exist? if it 'does not have Ccness, then what is that Ccness it does not have? It is not a computer: a computer has (???) Ccness. I asked such questions on at least 10 lists and the best answer was: everybody knows what it is.Now I am not asking what Ccness is, I ask what are we talking about, then comes the next: do we have a matching mindset (believe system) for the discussion (the lack of which preempts discussions between faithful and faithless). * Mark , these questions are not really aimed at you. I know: Stathis, Bruno, Brent, Torgny, and some more on this list have answers, but are those answers compatible? What I would prefer is to talk about the elements we include in this noumenon as single nouimena, each on its own merit and meaning, irrespectively of any adjustment to other elements. That comes later. John On 6/9/07, Mark Peaty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: SP: 'I've seen quite a few deluded people who believe that they are dead, but no-one who thinks they're unconscious...' MP: There is possibly a loose end or two here and perhaps clarification is needed, yet again: * It may well be that history is in the making, Torgny Tholerus is breaking new ground with Earth shaking results [sorry :-], and kudos will be yours if you can book him in first for a consultation [or dissection if it comes to that]. * Or this could conceivably be construed as a 'state of grace' in that Torgny is operating with no mental capacity being wasted on self-talk or internal commentary: 'just doing' whatever needs to be done and 'just being' what he needs to be; very Zen! * Then again it may be that I have misunderstood TT's grammar and that what he is denying is simply the separate existence of something called 'consciousness'. If that be the case then I would not argue because I agree that the subjective impression of being here now is simply what it is like to be part of the processing the brain does, ie updating the model of self in the world. * But I agree also that you are highly unlikely to come across someone who can truthfully say 'I am not conscious'. It seems totally self-contradictory: for example a person not just with 'hemi' neglect, but total neglect. How could such a person encounter themselves or the world? Or is there the possibility of something like so-called blindsight in every sensory modality? For example: deaf-hearing, numb-sensing, proprio-non-ception? This would imply a zombie [without 'a life'] which survived by making apparently random guesses about everything yet getting significantly more than chance success in each modality. A scary thought! Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 09/06/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:' What is the philosophical term for persons like me, that totally deny the existence of the consciousness?' MP: I think the word you are looking for is deluded. I've seen quite a few deluded people who believe that they are dead, but no-one who thinks they're unconscious... something to keep an eye out for. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Attempt toward a systematic description
Bruno; how about adding to Tom's reality survey the anti Aeistotelian: Reality is what we don't see? We get a partial impact of the 'total' and interpret it 1st person as our 'reality', as it was said some time ago here (Brent?) perceived reality what I really liked . Then came Colin with his reduced (or what was his term?) solipsism: paraphrasing the perceived reality into OUR world what we compoase of whatever we got. I know that you ask your oimniscient Loebian machine, but we, quotidien mortals, rely on our own stupidity about the world. And in this department perceived reality is what we have and it is close to Colin's personalized mini solipsism. John On 6/9/07, Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Le 08-juin-07, à 20:17, Tom Caylor a écrit : I should respond to your response. I'm in a busy pensive state lately, reading Theaetetus (as you suggested on the Incompleteness thread) along with Protagoras and some Aristotle (along with the dozen other books I'm always reading...) in the little time I have. Take your time I will be extremely busy the next two weeks (exams and then Siena Cie 2007). But you do make assumptions as part of the comp hypothesis, including assumptions about numbers. I just assume the validity of the excluded middle principle on purely arithmetical question. If you prefer I just assume that if you run a machine then either that machine will stop or it will run forever. I don't know anyone not believing in this, but I have to make it as an assumption because I can not prove it from less, and I use it in the proofs. In the same spirit I assume 0 is not the successor of a positive integer, etc. (I reason axiomatically). Some technics can make this hypothesis weaker though. LRA looks to be about the particulars of arithmetic. PA, with induction, is trying to generalize to come up with some universal truths about arithmetic. About numbers, ok. But LRA has access to only one particular truth at a time, with no awareness of generalities/universals. Just few of them. OK. LRA is, like PA, under the godelian limitation joug. Only, PA knows it! Lobian machine, like PA or ZF, are godel-limited, but they are aware of their limitation. OK? So PA has this awareness, by *definition*. Not by definition at all! Showing this is the difficult part of Godel's second incompleteness theorem. It is done for the first time in some ugly way by Ackerman and Hilbert in their *Grundlagen*. It is the work of Lob which has made possible to do it in a beautiful way, and this has been a key step to the discovery of the modal logics G and G*, which formalizes completely the propositional logic of self-reference. It is a useful *tool* in mathematics, but you are assuming it is a part of reality at the deepest level. This is part your Arithmetic Realism part of the comp hyp, is it not? No. I consider PA as a clever being, a sort of *baby God* like any of us could hope to be (with comp). PA is just a universal machine knowing that she is universal (in a weak and precise sense). That is, PA is what I call a lobian machine. In some sense, PA is a turing machine having already the cognitive abilities to begin being anxious about the length of its available tape. This is because even the statement 1+2=2+1 is a Plato-like statement. The Aristotle verification would be to take 1 object and then take 2 more objects and count the group as a whole. Then take 2 objects and then 1 object and count the group as a whole. But, first of all, there are at least conceptually a (at least potentially) infinite number of objects you could use for this experiment, and you could do the experiment as an observer from an infinite number of angles/perspectives. Plus, a difference in perspective could make it so that you are taking the objects in a different order and so invalidate the experiment. I don't know what the implication is here other than there are very fundamental philosophical assumptions to deal with here. This is even without bringing multiplication into the picture. It seems, if you are going to base your reality on math, that these kinds of questions aren't unimportant because they remind me of the fundamental problems at the base of the quantum versus relativity. I cannot comment because it is a bit vague for me. Normally I can not address physical question before getting the comp-physics. Bruno The above does not require physical reality, but only concepts that we can think about looking inward (eyes closed view). But even though it is only conceptual, my point is that we are taking a leap of faith even when we talk about 1+1=2, classifying an infinite number of cases into one equivalence class. Not at all. This could appears in engineering when you apply a theory, not when you do math. 1+1 = 2 means what you
Re: Asifism
On Jun 9, 2:10 pm, Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Le 08-juin-07, à 18:39, Jef Allbright a écrit : I don't believe that people in this list would take consciousness as a primary reality, except perhaps those who singles out the third universal soul hypostasis (the first person, alias the one described by Bp p in the lobian interview) like George Levy, David, etc. Since my name has popped up I'll stop lurking and come clean! I've been thinking about this again since reading Galen Strawson's recent defence of 'panpsychism' in Consciousness and its place in Nature. His view is that any 'emergent' phenomenon must supervene on fundamental properties of the same type - e.g. 'liquidity' is a characteristic behaviour of a fluid that simply supervenes on the objective characteristics of its constituent molecules, which in turn supervenes on quantum-level phenomena and so on down to superstrings or whatever. But there is no analogous narrative in which it is correspondingly obvious that 1st-person *experience* should ever 'emerge' from any objective or 3rd-person description, in his view. Also in mine. Reviewing some of my earlier posts on this subject, I would now say that my view is that our 1st-person experience is privileged direct evidence (i.e. the *only* direct evidence we have) that we, and all phenomena of which we are aware, emerge through differentiation of a subjective existential field. Such differentiation may be termed 'sense-action', because it is simultaneously the self-sensing relationships of (what Strawson terms) 'ultimates' (e.g. vibrational strings) that emerge through differentiation, and the source of all action and structure. We abstract our notion of 'physical law' from the inter-relations of such ultimates, but it is crucial that we do not concretise such 'law' as some real superadded influence introjected from 'outside' the existential field. Rather, we take the field for what it is, and accept that it feels and does as we find it. This is simply wielding Occam's razor with precision to prevent an infinite regress of 'explanation'. Ultimately, to preserve the appearances, existence must necessarily be self-actualising , self-motivating, and self-sensing. By rooting sense-action in the ultimates, we can now embed our own intuitive sensing and motivation firmly where it needs to be in ultimate reality. Fundamentally, we do what we do for (something like) the reasons we believe, and we feel what we feel because that is (something like) how reality ultimately feels about it. Our actions emerge from ultimate action, and our sensing emerges from ultimate sensing. This is crucial for questions of 'free will' and suffering (which I do not put in scare quotes). Our 'will' is a complex emergent of ultimate will-to-action, and our painful experiences are directly inherited from underlying layers of sense-action that simultaneously motivate our consequential actions. By contrast, the 'non-conscious' zombie is existentially and causally disconnected - as postulated, it is abstracted from sense-action; it cannot see, hear, or feel and hence cannot enact (except in *our* imagination). No self-sensing = no relationship = no action. The poor creature is a free-standing 'physical abstraction' - the uninhabited husk of a self-actualised subject. It's the notion you're left with when you posit an 'externalised world' (i.e. a model) in pure intellectual abstraction from concrete self-actualisation. With comp neither matter nor mind can be taken as primitive or primary reality. My approach proposes something like a fundamental subjective field as 'primitive' (in an Occamish way). Such a field is not yet mind nor matter, but both 'mind' and 'matter' emerge from it through differentiation, with characteristics that supervene naturally on those proposed as primitive. That is: its fundamental action is self- motivated and self-sensing, and consequently all complex emergents are experienced as self-motivated and self-sensing. If valid, this approach is a knock-down argument against the equation of consciousness with computation. The reason is that computational 'causation' depends on the introjection of 'rules' from a context external to the computed 'world', and hence loses contact both with intrinsic causal self-motivation and the fundamental linkage of felt- sense and action. Hence any felt-sense a computer may possess as a concrete object must necessarily be independent of whatever purely programmed 'actions' it may be instantiating. Also, the notion of, say, a rock implementing any computation, and hence potentially any attached consciousness, is likewise struck down by the lack of coordination between ultimate sense-action and the notional computational content. I've written the above fairly quickly and it's probably not very well expressed, but if anyone's interested I'd be happy to debate and enlarge. But it expresses why I think Torgny's position is absolutely
Re: Asifism
I think it can be useful to look at the problem of consciousness from a third person point of view, doing so you would conclude we are a bunch of apes aware of our surroundings wondering why it is we are aware of our surroundings. If you explored further you would see plenty of reasons to explain why those apes were aware; they have senses which take inputs from the environment and brains which process those inputs to create an internal representation, about which they can speak (and wonder) about. I can see the path of logic that Torngy is following: qualia are simply manifestations of physical events - there is nothing magical or special about - their reality is an illusion - they don't exist. However even if qualia/consciousness is an elaborate illusion then it is that illusion they are referring to when they claim to be conscious. Jason --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
