Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:
> <2352.144.137.45.178.1164405260.squirrel.domain.name.hidden>
> <45679DBF.20006.domain.name.hidden>
> In-Reply-To: <45679DBF.20006.domain.name.hidden>
>
> Hi Brent,
> Please see the post/replies to Quentin/LZ.
> I am trying to understand the context in which I can be wrong and how
> other people view the proposition. There can be a mixture of mistakes and
> poor communication and I want to understand all the ways in which these
> things play a role in the discourse.
>
> So...
>
>>> So, I have my zombie scientist and my human scientist and I
>>> ask them to do science on exquisite novelty. What happens?
>>> The novelty is invisible to the zombie, who has the internal
>>> life of a dreamless sleep.
>> Scientists don't literally "see" novel theories - they invent
>> them by combining other ideas. "Invisible" is just a metaphor.
>
> I am not talking about the creative process. I am talking about the
> perception of a natural world phenomena that has never before been
> encountered. There can be no a-priori scientific knowledge in such
> situations. It is as far from a metaphor as you can get. I mean literal
> invisibility. See the red photon discussion in the LZ posting. If all you
> have is a-priori abstract (non-phenomenal) rules of interpretation of
> sensory signals to go by, then one day you are going to misinterpret
> because the signals came in the same from a completely different source
> and you;d never know it.
Yes, that's a mistake humans make too. Even simpler, have you ever seen the demonstration in which a long red rod is hung in a rotating trapezoidal white window frame. In spite of knowing exactly what is happening, the window frame appears to a a square frame that is oscillating while the rod rotates and in some way passes through the material of the frame. Your pre-scientific hard-wiring misleads you.
>That is the invisibility I claim at the center of
> the zombie's difficulty.
But it will also present the same difficulty to the human scientist. An in fact it is easy to build a robot that detects and responds to radio waves that are completely invisible to a human scientist.
Are you saying that a computer cannot have any pre-programmed rules for dealing with sensory inputs, or if it does it's not a zombie. Or are you claiming that humans have some pre-scientific knowledge that cannot be implemented in a computer.
>>> The reason it is invisible is because there is no phenomenal
>>> consciousness. The zombie has only sensory data to use to
>>> do science. There are an infinite number
>>> of ways that same sensory data could arrive from an infinity
>>> of external natural world situations. The sensory data is
>>> ambiguous - it's all the same - action potential pulse trains
>>> traveling from sensors to brain. The zombie cannot possibly
>>> distinguish the novelty from the sensory data
>> Why can it not distinguish them as well as the limited human scientist?
>
> Because the human scientist is distinguishing them within the phenomenal
> construct made from the sensory data, not directly from the sensory data -
> which all the zombie has. The zombie has no phenomenal construct of the
> external world. It has an abstraction entirely based on the prior history
> of non-phenonmenal sensory input.
It is very confusing that you make assertions about zombies and I can't tell whether you're defining "zombie" or you suppose the assertion follows from something else. Why does the zombie have no phenomenal construct? Certainly a computer can take sensory data and create a model of the world from it. Is "phenomenal" a special word that is supposed to make this different from what people do, like "qualia"?
>
>>> and has no awareness of the external world or even its own boundary.
>> Even simple robots like the Mars Rovers have awareness of the
>> world, where they are, their internal states, and
>
> No they don't. They have an internal state sufficiently complex to
> navigate according to the rules of the program (a-priori knowledge) given
> to them by humans,
But humans have a-priori knowledge given them by evolution.
>who are the only beings that are actually aware where
> the rover is. Look at what happens when the machine gets hung up on
> novelty... like the rock nobody could allow for.... who digs it out of it?
> no the rover... humans do....The rover has no internal life at all. Going
> 'over there' is what the human sees. 'actuate this motor until until this
> number equals that number' is what the rover does.
>
>> No. You've simply assumed that you know what "awareness" is and you
> have the defined a zombie as not having it. You might as
>> well have just defined "zombie" as "just like a person, but can't do
> science" or "can't whistle". Whatever definition you give
>> still leaves the question of whether a being whose internal
>> processes (and a fortiori the external processes) are
>> functionally identical with a human's is conscious.
>
> This is the nub of it. It's where I struggle to see the logic others see.
> I don't think I have done what you describe. I'll walk myself through it.
>
> What I have done is try to figure out a valid test for phenomenal
> consciousness.
What is the functional definition of "phenomenal"? Is there "non-phenomenal consciousness"?
> When you take away phenomenal consciousness what can't you do?
I don't know, because I don't know what it is.
>It seems
> science is a unique/special candidate for a variety of reasons. Its
> success is critically dependent on the existence of a phenomenal
> representation of the external world.
It's criticaly dependent on having a representation of the external world - I don't know what "phenomenal" adds to that.
>
> The creature that is devoid of such constructs is what we typically call a
> zombie.
I would say a zombie is a thing that has no inner narrative about itself and its relation to the world. A Mars rover does have that. It has an internal map and it locates itself within that map. It knows its temperature, the charge on its batteries. It records these things. It probably falls short of full consciousness in that it doesn't learn from the records or consult them to make decisions.
>May be a mistake to call it that. No matter.
>
> OK, so the real sticking point is the 'phenomenal construct'. The zombie
> could have a 'construct' with as much detail in it as the human phenomenal
> construct, but that is phenomenally inert (a numerical abstraction).
Again you seem to be calling on "phenomenal" to do all the work of denying consciousness to the zombie. You could just use "human" instead.
>Upon
> what basis could the zombie acquire such a construct? It can't get it from
> sensory feeds without knowing already what sensory feeds relate to what
> part of the natural world.
Neither could humans if evolution had not provided them with hard-wired ability to learn an interpretation of visual fields for example.
>That a-priori knowledge is not available. It's
> what the zombie is trying to find out. This is the logical loop from my
> perspective.
>
> So who's in the logical loop here? I am assuming zero a-priori scientific
> knowledge in the human and the zombie.
Then you have not assumed a human.
>How does each get to a state of
> non-zero scientific knowledge of the external natural world? For this is
> what has actually happened in an evolutionary sense. We have phenomenal
> consciousness for a reason.
>
> If you zero out all a-priori knowledge in two entities, one with and one
> without phenomenal consciousness the only one that can make any progress
> is the one with phenomenal consciosueness - the One that has experiences
> of the external world generated in their head.
>
> In a sense the a-priori knowledge that the human has is 'hard-wired' in a
> capability to construct phenomenal scenes from sensory data. That a-priori
> 'knowledge' is not scientific knowledge of the type found by using that
> faculty. The phenomenal scenes make some assumptions and they can
> mis-inform. But they do connect the scientist with the world outside the
> scientist in a direct way that means that when something acts in
> contradiction to previous behaviour that novelty is phenomenally visible.
>
> I have made no assumptions of a-priori scientific knowledge found using
> phenomenal consciousness. I can show technically how the lack of
> phenomenal consciousness prevents the zombie'd scientist from ever
> accurately gettinmg at laws of the external natural world.
>
> On the other hand if you assume a computation (a numerical abstraction)
> capable of doing it then you are assuming phenomenal consciousness,
> because all of the a-priori knowledge inherent in such a device has to be
> bestowed upon the creature by humans. That model has been created with
> scientific exploration made possible with phenomenal consciousness. That
> such a creature then automatically has access to the external world is
> just an assumption.
>
> Sensory feeds have no phenomenal content! Sensory feeds poking an
> abstraction have nothing to say about the world external to the zombie.
>
> So who's really making the assumption here? Frankly my head is spinning..
> more thinking needed on that.
>
>>> Now, we have the situation where in order that science be done by a
> human
>>> we must have phenomenal consciousness.
>> That's mere assertion. But even if it's true it would only imply that a
> computational being that was functionally equivalent to a human at some
> low-level would both be able to do science and be conscious.
>> Brent Meeker
>
> For this last bit... see the paramecium posting to Stathis... maybe
> that'll help.
>
> I can't see I have assumed anything. Indeed I see everyone else as
> assuming something about the nature of sensory feeds and the availability
> of a-priori knowledge in a situation where there is none.
There is none because you've postulated it away. All you're proving is that computers have not evolved to include the necessary sensory processing. But they can be given it.
Brent Meeker
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list-unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Sat Nov 25 2006 - 00:35:17 PST