Brent Meeker:
>
<snip>
> > Observation involves (necessitates) the AGI having experiences, some of
> > which are an experiential representation of the external world. The
> > process of generation of the experiential field(s) involves the
> insertion
> > of the AGI in the chain of causality from that which is observed 'out
> > there' through the external world to the sensing surface, impact (causal
> > interaction) measured by sensing, transport (causality again) of the
> > measurement through the AGI to the brain where the measurement
> > participates in the causality that is the creation of the experiential
> > field.
>
> So that is what is *involved* in creating the experiential field. But
> what is the field? I understand it is a representation of the external
> world, but what about it makes it a representation? I hope you're not
> going to say because "the observer" recognizes or uses it as such.
>
The fields:
In the case of visual field: virtual bosons as photons
In the case of aural fields: virtual bosons as phonons
In the case of touch fields: virtual bosons as touchons :-)
In the case of touch fields: virtual bosons as tasteons :-)
I don't know the details of the various bosons yet, but there is an infinity
of possibilities as the virtual bosons are arbitrarily configurable by the
spatiotemporal behaviour of the neural membranes involved. This is virtual
matter in the same sense that all the members of the standard model depict
matter i.e. boson is to matter as virtual boson is to virtual matter.
> >It is by virtue of the existence/reality of the _entire_ causal
> > chain that the experiential field can be created and be called
> observation
> > of the external world. (Clearly experiential fields can also be created
> as
> > hallucinations/dreams, without the full causality chain - but that is
> not
> > the 'observation' we are talking about). In making use of the complete
> > causal chain the oberver has access (inherits some of the properties of)
> > to that which is observed.
>
> This sound like your experiential field is a play performed in the
> Cartesian theater fof the edification of the observer.
No, it's better visualised as 'being a not-mirror' :-)
Imagine you embedded a mirror in your head, but you were only interested in
everything the mirror was not. That is, the image in the mirror is
manipulating the space intimately adjacent to the reflecting surface. Keep
the space, throw the reflecting surface and glass away. What you are
interested in is 'being' that space, not the mirror. When you do that the
'movie screen' that is the experiential field becomes part of you. Yes it's
a play, only 1 viewer who literally 'is' the theatre, no regressing
homunculi. It's just that the brain material (neurons) paints the space like
the mirror did.
BTW....Each neuron is like a single paintbrush and they all paint in
parallel real time. Neurons to not have to actually 'fire' to paint. There
are no particles actually traveling anywhere. If you slice occipital with a
scalpel early damage would interfere with learning and ability to report
contents of vision... but not necessarily the visual field itself. It'd take
a lot of damage before the visual field was reportably affected...by that
stage I'm pretty sure you'd have bled to death ... not an experiment I'd
like to participate in, but that's my prediction. :-)
>
> >This is not 'creating reality' in the
> > Berkeleyian sense. This is participation in it. This is construction of
> a
> > representation of it from within the reality.
> >
> > This process I have described is observation and all of observation -
> > nothin else counts as observation.
>
> So anything happening in my brain that has a causal connection to the
> world is an observation. I can buy that, but it seems so broad as to
> include things, like recalling memories, not usually called
> "observation".
>
> Brent Meeker
Recalled memories are in the same class as the hallucinations/dreams I
mentioned. Such internally sourced fields (including all the emotions) are
not the ones I call 'observation'. The sensory fields are hooked into the
casual chain from the sensory measurements. They participate in the
observation process.
All pretty straightforward.
The only weirdness is the solution to the 'hard problem' that enables the
direct portrayal of the external world in your head (how the few necessary
external properties are inherited). These are the solution to the
unity/binding problem. Virtual bosons, whilst easy to see in the brain, do
not solve the unity/binding problem. That is, why all the painting neurons
actually general a single picture.
Nevertheless that's my slant on building an observer.
The main thing to get from the depiction is that measurement (or any causal
interaction, for that matter) is NOT observation from the point of view of
being able to formulate survivable generalisations about the external world
in the face of arbitrary levels of novelty. Dumb-as-doggy-do
machines/computers hooked up to sensing transduction and using a-priori
rules (programs) do not 'observe' at all. They merely act 'as-if' they are
observing to the extent that the derived rules are faithful to the distal
world within which the machine is supposed to be successful. They only
survive by virtue of their groundedness in the real human observations that
gave them the rules they use.
That's the basic set of design decisions (gotta choose something!) behind
the 'artificial scientist' that must have 'real' observations.
Cheers
Colin Hales
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Received on Wed Oct 11 2006 - 02:14:41 PDT