Jason Resch wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden
> <mailto:marchal.domain.name.hidden>> wrote:
>
>
> 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 the cosmic rays are simply keeping her neurons working normally, then
> I'm more inclined to believe she remains conscious, but I'm not certain
> one way or the other.
>
>
>
> 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?
>
>
> I believe consciousness can be recovered from a digital description, but
> I don't believe the description itself is conscious while being beamed
> from one teleporting station to the other. I think it is only when the
> body/computer simulation is instantiated can consciousness recovered
> from the description.
>
> Consider sending the description over an encrypted channel, without the
> right decryption algorithm and key the description can't be
> differentiated from random noise. The same bits could be interpreted
> entirely differently depending completely on how the recipient uses it.
> The "meaning" of the transmission is recovered when it forms a system
> with complex relations, presumably the same relations as the original
> one that was teleported, even though it may be running on a different
> physical substrate, or a different computer architecture.
Right. That's why I think that a simulation instantiating a conscious being
would have to include a lot of environment and the being would only be conscious
*relative to that environment*. I think it is an interesting empirical question
whether a person can be conscious with no interaction with their environment.
It appears that it is possible for short periods of time, but I once read that
in sensory deprivation experiments the subjects minds would go into a loop after
a couple of hours. Is that still being conscious?
Brent Meeker
>
> I don't deny that a random process could be the source of a transmission
> that resulted in the creation of a conscious being, what I deny is that
> random *simple computations, lacking any causal linkages, could form
> consciousness.
>
> * By simple I mean the types of computation done in discrete steps, such
> as multiplication, addition, etc. Those done by a single neuron or a
> small collection of logic gates.
>
> 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.
>
>
> Here I would say that consciousness is not correlated with the physical
> description at any point in time, but rather the computational history
> and flow of information, and that this is responsible for the subjective
> experience of being Alice. If Alice's mind is described by a random
> process, albeit one which gives the appearance of consciousness during
> her exam, she nevertheless has no coherent computational history and her
> mind contains no large scale informational structures. The state
> machine that would represent her in the case of injection of random
> noise is a different state machine that would represent her normally
> functioning brain.
>
> Jason
>
>
>
> 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 <mailto:jasonresch.domain.name.hidden.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 5:59 AM, Bruno Marchal
>> <marchal.domain.name.hidden <mailto:marchal.domain.name.hidden.ac.be>> 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 - 17:55:31 PST