On 29 Nov 2008, at 15:56, Abram Demski wrote:
>
> Bruno,
>
>> The argument was more of the type : "removal of unnecessay and
>> unconscious or unintelligent parts. Those parts have just no
>> perspective. If they have some perpective playing arole in Alice's
>> consciousness, it would mean we have not well chosen the substitution
>> level. You are reintroducing some consciousness on the elementary
>> parts, here, I think.
>>
>
> The problem would not be with removing individual elementary parts and
> replacing them with functionally equivalent pieces; this obviously
> preserves the whole. Rather with removing whole subgraphs and
> replacing them with equivalent pieces. As Alice-in-the-cave is
> supposed to show, this can remove consciousness, at least in the limit
> when the entire movie is replaced...
The limit is not relevant. I agrre that if you remove Alice, you
remove any possibility for Alice to manifest herself in your most
probable histories. The problem is that in the range activity of the
projected movie, removing a part of the graph change nothing. It
changes only the probability of recoevering Alice from her history in,
again, your most probable history. IThere are no physical causal link
between the experience attributed to the physical computation and the
"causal history of projecting a movie". The incremental removing of
the graph hilighted the lack of causality in the movie. Perhaps not in
the best clearer way, apparently. Perhaps I should have done the case
of a non dream. I will come back on this.
>
>
>
>>
>> Then you think that if someone is conscious with some brain, which
>> for
>> some reason, does never use some neurons, could loose consciousness
>> when that never used neuron is removed?
>> If that were true, how could still be confident with an artificial
>> digital brain. You may be right, but the MEC hypothesis would be put
>> in doubt.
>>
>
> I am thinking of it as being the same as someone having knowledge
> which they never actually use. Suppose that the situation is so
> extreme that if we removed the neurons involved in that knowledge, we
> will not alter the person's behavior; yet, we will have removed the
> knowledge. Similarly, if the behavior of Alice in practice comes from
> a recording, yet a dormant conscious portion is continually ready to
> intervene if needed, then removing that dormant portion removes her
> consciousness.
You should definitely do the removing of the graph in the non-dream
situation. Let us do it.
Let us take a situation without complex inputs. Let us imagine Alice
is giving a conference in a big room, so, as input she is just blinded
by some projector, + some noise, and she makes a talk on Astronomy (to
fix the things). Now from 8h30 to 8H45 pm, she has just no brain, she
get the "motor" info from a projected recording of a previous *perfect
dream* of that conference, dream done the night before, or send from
Platonia (possible in principle). Then, by magic, to simplify, at 8h45
she get back the original brain, which by optical means inherits the
stage at the end of the conference in that perfect dream. I ask you,
would you say Alice was a zombie, during the conference?
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Sat Nov 29 2008 - 15:12:44 PST