On 19 Nov 2008, at 20:17, Jason Resch wrote:
> To add some clarification, I do not think spreading Alice's logic
> gates across a field and allowing cosmic rays to cause each gate to
> perform the same computations that they would had they existed in
> her functioning brain would be conscious. I think this because in
> isolation the logic gates are not computing anything complex, only
> AND, OR, NAND operations, etc. This is why I believe rocks are not
> conscious, the collisions of their molecules may be performing
> simple computations, but they are never aggregated into complex
> patterns to compute over a large set of information.
Actually I agree with this argument. But it does not concern Alice,
because I have provide her with an incredible amount of luck. The
lucky rays fix the neurons in a genuine way (by that abnormally big
amount of pure luck).
If you doubt Alice remain conscious, how could you accept an
experience of simple teleportation (UDA step 1 or 2). If you can
recover consciousness from a relative digital description, how could
that consciousness distinguish between a recovery from a genuine
description send from earth (say), and a recovery from a description
luckily generated by a random process? If you recover from a
description (comp), you cannot know if that description has been
generated by a computation or a random process, unless you give some
prescience to the logical gates. Keep in mind we try to refute the
conjunction MECH and MAT.
Nevertheless your intuition below is mainly correct, but the point is
that accepting it really works, AND keeping MECH, will force us to
negate MAT.
Bruno
>
> Jason
>
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Jason Resch <jasonresch.domain.name.hidden>
> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 5:59 AM, Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
> wrote:
>
>
> Does everyone accept, like Russell, that, assuming COMP and MAT,
> Alice
> is not a zombie? I mean, is there someone who object? Remember we are
> proving implication/ MAT+MECH => <something>. We never try to argue
> about that <something> per se. Eventually we hope to prove MAT+MECH =>
> false, that is NOT(MAT & MECH) which is equivalent to MAT implies NOT
> MECH, MECH => NOT MAT, etc.
>
> (by MAT i mean materialism, or naturalism, or physicalism or more
> generally "the physical supervenience thesis", according to which
> consciousness supervenes on the physical activity of the brain.
>
> Bruno, I am on the fence as to whether or not Alice is a Zombie.
> The argument for her not being conscious is related to the non
> causal effect of information in this scenario. A string of 1's and
> 0's which is simply defined out of nowhere, in my opinion cannot
> contain conscious observers, even if it could be considered to
> encode brain states conscious observers or a universe with conscious
> observers. To have meaningful information there must be relations
> between objects, such as the flow of information in the succession
> of states in a Turing machine. In the case of Alice, the
> information coming from the cosmic rays is meaningless, and might as
> well have occurred in isolation. If all of Alice's logic gates had
> been spread over a field, and made to fire in the same way due to
> cosmic rays and if all logic gates remained otherwise disconnected
> from each other, would anyone consider this field of logic gates be
> conscious?
>
> I have an idea that consciousness is related to hierarchies of
> information, at the lowest levels of neural activity, simple
> computations of small amounts of information combine information
> into a result, and then these higher level results are passed up to
> higher levels of processing, etc. For example the red/green/blue
> data from the eyes are combined into single pixels, these pixels are
> combined into an field of colors, this field of colors is then
> processed by object classification sections of the brain. So my
> argument that Alice might not be conscious would be related to the
> skipping of steps through the injection of information which is
> "empty" (not having been computed from lower level sets of
> information and hence not actually conveying any information).
>
> Jason
>
> ) I do not believe is
>
>
> >
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Wed Nov 19 2008 - 15:55:30 PST