Comp, or the idea that concious entities must necessarily be Turing
Machines is a particular working hypothesis that some of us ascribe to
but others don't. Bruno in particular has developed consequences of
this hypothesis. I personally "sit on the fence" - ie that concious
entities are necessarily capable of universal computation, but may be
capable of more than a Turing Machine (my particular gripe is that I
find it hard to see how a TM could have free will). Therefore some of
Bruno's conclusions will be acceptible for me, but others may not. I
haven't yet figured out which is which!
For that reason, I would personally doubt that the GoL could support
concious life. However, I could imagine minor variations to the GoL
that would get around my "objection", so this question is at least
philosophically interesting.
Cheers
Russell Standish
>
>
> On 20 xxx -1, Marchal wrote:
>
>
> > Why do you want making these poor little creatures to be
> > wrong ? And wrong about their own feelings.
> >
> > How could someone believe to be conscious without being conscious ?
>
> So far, I absolutely side with BM: To believe anything presupposes
> being conscious. Descartes was right about that much.
>
>
> > "Running" a machine is a modality which makes sense only relatively
> > to you. That relative running makes it possible for the machine to
> > manifest its consciousness relatively to you. It makes possible
> > to entangled and share computationnal histories. But consciousness per se
> > is not linked to the dynamical physical activity itself.
>
> I guess it's time to reveal the terrible secret: Your list is infected by
> a biological naturalist.
>
> My Searlean objection to the above brand of functionalism
> is, How can computation as such be sufficient to generate consciousness,
> when it obviously isn't an intrinsic process of any physical system?
>
> To clarify: There is a distinction between intrinsic and
> observer-relative features of reality. The former include all properties
> that are logically independent of the intentional attributions of
> observers, such as the molecular structure of the object I am sitting on.
> The latter are properties that exist only relative to such attributions,
> such as being a chair. The problem here is that computation, to quote
> Searle, is "not a machine process that like neuron firing or internal
> combustion; rather, computation is an abstract mathematic process that
> exists only relative to conscious observers and interpreters" (*The
> Mystery of Consciousness*, 17).
>
> Note that this is not equivalent to the Chinese Room argument, which says
> that syntacs is not sufficient for semantics; it denies instead that
> physics is sufficient for syntax. Computation and all other syntax is
> observer-relative, and in one sense exists only from a 1. person point of
> view. Please release me from the spell of this simple consideration.
>
> Seasons' greetings,
> --
> Gisle Tangenes
>
>
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Dr. Russell Standish Director
High Performance Computing Support Unit,
University of NSW Phone 9385 6967
Sydney 2052 Fax 9385 6965
Australia R.Standish.domain.name.hidden
Room 2075, Red Centre
http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
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Received on Mon Dec 20 1999 - 20:18:11 PST