On Jun 5, 7:12 am, Bruno Marchal <marc....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> Le 03-juin-07, à 21:52, Hal Finney a écrit :
>
>
>
> > Part of what I wanted to get at in my thought experiment is the
> > bafflement and confusion an AI should feel when exposed to human ideas
> > about consciousness. Various people here have proffered their own
> > ideas, and we might assume that the AI would read these suggestions,
> > along with many other ideas that contradict the ones offered here.
> > It seems hard to escape the conclusion that the only logical response
> > is for the AI to figuratively throw up its hands and say that it is
> > impossible to know if it is conscious, because even humans cannot agree
> > on what consciousness is.
>
> Augustin said about (subjective) *time* that he knows perfectly what it
> is, but that if you ask him to say what it is, then he admits being
> unable to say anything. I think that this applies to "consciousness".
> We know what it is, although only in some personal and uncommunicable
> way.
> Now this happens to be true also for many mathematical concept.
> Strictly speaking we don't know how to define the natural numbers, and
> we know today that indeed we cannot define them in a communicable way,
> that is without assuming the auditor knows already what they are.
>
I fully agree. By the way, regarding time, I've wanted to post
something in the past regarding the the ancient Hebrew concept of time
which is dependent on persons (captured by the ancient Greek word
kairos, as opposed to the communicable chronos), but that's another
topic.
> So what can we do. We can do what mathematicians do all the time. We
> can abandon the very idea of *defining* what consciousness is, and try
> instead to focus on principles or statements about which we can agree
> that they apply to consciousness. Then we can search for (mathematical)
> object obeying to such or similar principles. This can be made easier
> by admitting some theory or realm for consciousness like the idea that
> consciousness could apply to *some* machine or to some *computational
> events" etc.
>
Actually, this approach is the same as in searching/discovering God.
I think that it is the same for any fundamental/ultimate truth. This
process of *recognition* is what happens when we would recognize that
a computer (or human) has consciousness by what it is saying. It is
not a 100% mathematical proof, by logical inference (that would not be
truth, but only consistency). It is a recognition of the kind of real
truth that we believe is there and for which we are searching on this
List.
Tom
> We could agree for example that:
> 1) each one of us know what consciousness is, but nobody can prove
> he/she/it is conscious.
> 2) consciousness is related to inner personal or self-referential
> modality
> etc.
>
> This is how I proceed in "Conscience et Mécanisme". ("conscience" is
> the french for consciousness, "conscience morale" is the french for the
> english "conscience").
>
>
>
> > In particular I don't think an AI could be expected to claim that it
> > knows that it is conscious, that consciousness is a deep and intrinsic
> > part of itself, that whatever else it might be mistaken about it could
> > not be mistaken about being conscious. I don't see any logical way it
> > could reach this conclusion by studying the corpus of writings on the
> > topic. If anyone disagrees, I'd like to hear how it could happen.
>
> As far as a machine is correct, when she introspects herself, she
> cannot not discover a gap between truth (p) and provability (Bp). The
> machine can discover correctly (but not necessarily in a completely
> communicable way) a gap between provability (which can potentially
> leads to falsities, despite correctness) and the incorrigible
> knowability or knowledgeability (Bp & p), and then the gap between
> those notions and observability (Bp & Dp) and sensibility (Bp & Dp &
> p). Even without using the conventional name of "consciousness",
> machines can discover semantical fixpoint playing the role of non
> expressible but true statements.
> We can *already* talk with machine about those true unnameable things,
> as have done Tarski, Godel, Lob, Solovay, Boolos, Goldblatt, etc.
>
>
>
> > And the corollary to this is that perhaps humans also cannot
> > legitimately
> > make such claims, since logically their position is not so different
> > from that of the AI. In that case the seemingly axiomatic question of
> > whether we are conscious may after all be something that we could be
> > mistaken about.
>
> This is an inference from "I cannot express p" to "I can express not
> p". Or from ~Bp to B~p. Many atheist reason like that about the
> concept of "unameable" reality, but it is a logical error.
> Even for someone who is not willing to take the comp hyp into
> consideration, it is a third person communicable fact that
> self-observing machines can discover and talk about many non 3-provable
> and sometimes even non 3-definable true "statements" about them. Some
> true statements can only be interrogated.
> Personally I don' think we can be *personally* mistaken about our own
> consciousness even if we can be mistaken about anything that
> consciousness could be about.
>
> Bruno
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Tue Jun 05 2007 - 14:41:34 PDT