>
> You seem to be implying that there is some special physics
> involved in living processes: isn't that skimming a little
> close to vitalism?. All I see is the chemistry
> of large organic molecules, the fundamentals of which are
> well understood, even if the level of complexity is beyond
> what modern chemists' computer models can cope with. Classical
> chaos may make it impossible to perfectly model a living system
> in that the behaviour of the model will deviate from the
> behaviour of the original after a period of time, but the
> same is true if you try to model a game of pool.
>
> As for "modelling the physics that does the experience" not being
> the same as having the experience, I think your own argument
> showing that a colleague cannot behave as if he is conscious
> by doing science without actually being conscious refutes this.
Note: Scientists, by definition:
a) are doing science on the world external to them
b) inhabit a universe of exquisite novelty
...or there'd be no need for them!
The rules we have DO NOT COVER what the scientist works on.
IN order that the scientist be aware of the NOVELTY in the external it has
to be visible. Prior learning (rules) cannot predict what that novelty
will be or you'd already know what it was! It is not novel! So what do we
have? we have a form of a-priori knowledge that tells us simply what is
'out there'. It's called phenomenal consciousness. Without it novelty
would be invisible. Novelty can hide in ambiguous sensory feeds, so they
are not up to the task and are thus NOT what we use to do science.
Are we there yet?
> If you could model all the responses of a scientist to his
> environment on a computer in real
> time and clothe this computer in the skin of a scientist, then this
> artificial scientist should
> behave just like the real thing and therefore should have the same
> phenomenal
> consciousness as the real thing.
>
>> You tell it to respond 'as-if' it had them. What you do not do is model
>> all possible paramecium experiences, only the ones you used to create
>> the
>> model. The experience and the behaviour in response are 2 different
>> things. All you can observe is behaviour.
>
> Of course you model all possible paramecium experiences: you wouldn't be
> doing your job
> if you didn't. But that doesn't mean you have to program in each possible
> experience one
> by one, any more than a word processing program needs to explicitly
> contain every possible
> combination of characters a user might possibly input.
That is simply a way of avoiding the whole issue. You are assuming you
capture everything by modelling (the modelling perfectly) when you are
happy to accept what you have done (the perfect model) and then you
conclude that as a result you have captured everything? You have captured
100% of the partial truth.
That's way more circular and assuming than anything I've proposed.
How would you model 100% of the life of Stahis? The only complete way is
to BE Stathis. Everything else is a shortcut. Information lost. It's just
a question of degree.
Colin
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Received on Sun Nov 26 2006 - 06:47:51 PST