Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:
> <4143.60.230.177.147.1159483191.squirrel.domain.name.hidden>
> <1159554858.611099.323160.domain.name.hidden>
> In-Reply-To: <1159554858.611099.323160.domain.name.hidden>
>
> COL
> >> Yes. Causal chains, no matter how improbable, executed at the tiniest
> of
> >> scales the same ones that make LUCY our literal ancestor..... connect
> us.
> >
>
> LZ
> > It depends what you , mean by "connect". I am connected to these things,
> but they can manage without me. It is a one-way
> > kind of connection.
> >
>
> COL
> We are touching on the unidirectionality of time, here. Specifically the
> 2nd law of thermodynamics. Myriad infinitesimal entropy transactions
> resulting in overall increases in disorder but localised increases in
> order (& complexity , russel's playground) where net energy inflow exists
> - such as where we are in the beam of the floodlight called sol.
>
> If you mean the current state is the sum of the transactions of the entire
> history of the transactions comprising you... then yes, your present state
> is connected to all this causal history. The thing is that you literally
> _are_ it.
No, I'm literally *not* it. I am *not*, literally , the state of
the universe at the Big Bang. Even though it caused me,
in a sense. Causes are not the same entities as their effects, in
general.
> You are not like some bulldozed pile of independent stuff. So
> the idea that you and the causality that got you to your current state are
> separate is meaningless. You literally are causality - intrinsically made
> of change, but change that results in persistent structure that is you.
>
> So. yes. The model I am working with is untrinsically unidirectional, I
> suppose - one way in a flow sense and one way in a causal sense that the
> present (current state) did not 'cause' the past (previous states), nor
> can the future cause the present state.
>
> The easiest way to imagine it is to think of it as computation. Go through
> the sequence of operations 2+5=7. The 'present' is the state of the
> computation as is progresses (load, 2, load 5 add, display result, for
> example). The 7 did not cause a 2 and 5 to be added. Similarly 7's
> participation in a future computation cannot be said to have caused the 7.
>
> I know we can _imagine_ realms where bidirectional causality may be so.
> These are best represented in our formal mathemtical depictions of our
> world that have t in them, t for time). What I am saying is that the realm
> we are in is not like them. This is the one _we_ inhabit, with particular
> instances of particular kinds of things going on. Or perhaps a little more
> generally - the one we inhabit is currently in a state where
> unidirectional causality (albeit intrinsically randomised in selecttion of
> particular outcomes) rules. A really good book on this is 'The end of
> certainty' by Prigogine.
>
> COL
> >> identical to other sorts of neuron cohorts nearby. One set delivers
> qualia. The others do not.
>
> LZ
> >
> > How do you know ?
>
>
> COL
> Human verbal reports in a very detailed experimental regime. This was done
> by imaging humans and controlling for various physiological circumstances
> to eliminate the cohorts involved in things like (in the case of thirst)
> the 'mouth-dryness' factor and micturition state. When you control
> everything you end up being able to isolate one specific, unique region
> that is correlated only with the experienced emotion of 'thirst'
> (reasulting in an 'imperious desire' for drinking behaviour). The imaging
> results are in the book.
>
> The interesting thing in the case of these low level emotions is that they
> are all separate cohorts (thirst, hunger, sex drive etc). It's not one
> cohort that changes in subjective quality. There must be an evolutionary
> reason for this... maybe in DNA or maybe the emotions compete for
> behavioural dominance (micturition thwarting, for example, may stop you
> being afraid of something or vice versa)
So science *is* investigating phenomenal consciousness, not ignroaing
it?
> >
> >> So there are 2 parts to an explanation:
> >> a) single neuron properties
> >> b) cohort organisation
> >> Unless thesre is a property of single neurons to use for a cohort to do
> something with, you are attributing 'magical emergence' to a cohort. This
> >> is a logical inevitability.
>
> LZ
> > y-e-e-s. But where are you without emergence? Qualia would
> > then be properties of quarks. Wihich brings on a Grain problem with a
> vengeance.
> >
>
> COL
> There are no gaines to have a problem with. See below.
?????
> COL
> >> Magical emergence means attributing some sort of property inherent in
> organisation itself.
>
> LZ
> >
> > The point of emergence is rather that the property is *not* inherent in
> the lower-level parts and relations.
>
> COL
> Yes, but these properties cannot exist without colligative actions of
> _something_. Like I said:
And pheomenal properties at the neuronal level must emerge from
colligative actions of molecules.
> LAKE is to H20
> as
> REDness is to 'what?'.
>
> That is, what elemental property is dragged along with matter (atoms,
> molecules) that can result in it being 'like something' to be those
> atoms/molecules? Yes, you can say they are behaving in a specific way
> ...like neural cells doing the "qualia dance".... but you are still stuck
> with not knowing the 'what?' shown above. This is only
> correlation/description , not causation/explanation. The real question is
> to ask yourself what are the innate circumstances in the universe that
> would mean doing the neural qualia dance be 'like something'? This
> fundamentally questions your view of the universe.
That is the question. You seem to be rejecting one answer --
"magical" emergence -- without supplying another.
If qualia don't emerge, they are either non-existent , or they
are properties of fundamental particles -- which is
where your Grain Problem comes in.
> That view is, in my model, that qualia are not about what is you, but what
> 'is not' you. In a spatial sense. You are manipulating the space you
> inhabit. Space is stuff. It has a permeability and permittivity for
> example. To an accuracy of several orders of magnitude more then 1 part in
> 10^20 you - all of us are space - in essence, we are kind of not there.
> Space is the dominant feature of being a human. Our relationship with
> space is, in my model, easily seen - our structural components (entropy
> transactions) derive from a common parent structure. In other words the
> organisational structure of the space and the matter within it come
> literally from one set of common parent structures down deep.
Space doensn't have any inherent structure. It is *trivially*
true that the structure of "spaces" -- different sized gaps --
is imposed bymatter. There is a spherical space inside
a ping-pong ball because ping-pong balls are hollow spheres.
But that doesn't help **at all** with the grain problem. The
tiny interatomic and intermolecular spaces are still far too
fine-grained
for qualia.
> They are
> identical at this level. Hence when any matter does anything, the space it
> in habits cooperates in a very intimate way. There is no 'granularity'
> issue.
Yes there is. Our phenomenal experiene is not detailed
at the neruonal level, and even less so at the atomic level.
As explained, interatomic spaces obviously have the same detail as the
atomic
level.
You might want to claim that only spaces at the neuronal
or higher level count, but that looks like emergence.
> There is no need to have an 'ultimate building block'.
> When you stare at a human - or any 'stuff' at all, you are not staring at
> organs or cells or molecules or atoms ot protons or electrons or photons
> .... what you are looking at is an organised collection of X with a really
> good qualia paint job.
So ? If the qualia paint job exists only a a relatively
high level of organisation, that is emergence.
> An analogy: stare at a building made purely of bricks. You can say - and
> be right - that you are staring at a building. But you are not. You are
> staring at organised bricks...ie only bricks. Extend that to humans - and
> ask what is the brick? What it is _not_ is any of the 'things' we isolate
> with appearances - like atoms, cells, etc (these are 'buildings' in the
> analogy). The statement "X has an appearance" is meaningless - appearance
> is something we add to large accretions of it.
If you really think thre is no primary matter, that is one
less reason to reject emergence.
> My solution to this 'what?' = X (=brick) question is to say that whatever
> X is, space and all matter are made of it. A common parent in a very deep
> organisational hierarchy which we have only just begun to unpack. The only
> property you need to assign to X is the property of change. i.e. that X
> goes cyclically through a series of states (lossless, in an entropy/energy
> sense). When you do that you can observe a relationship between one
> organisation (space) and another (matter) and qualia are easily seen to
> result from the cellular qualia dance.
I can't make any sense of that. You seem to be saying that
both matter and space are phenomenal illusions while
simultaneously saying that qualia emerge from a particular
form of matter, "cells".
> Another way of looking at the model is to imagine a waterfall. Imagine,
> lost in the struture of change that is a waterfall (H20 passing through a
> region of space), in one particular place in the waterfall, the shape of a
> human outlined in the flow. This is, at the most fundamental level, a
> metaphor for the reality of a universe in which qualia make sense.
I don't see how that metaphor connects with qualia.
> It also
> predicts what looks like what we describe with maths - gravity and quantum
> mechanics and other stuff, but that's a different issue (Cahill can do
> that)... I'm only interested in qualia and the AI I can make with it.
>
> This is kind of interesting - you are forcing me to voice things in ways I
> would not have otherwise. :-)
>
> Colin Hales
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Received on Sun Oct 01 2006 - 10:12:44 PDT