On 25 Aug, 14:32, Stathis Papaioannou <stath....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> Let's say the alien brain in its initial environment produced a
> certain output when it was presented with a certain input, such as a
> red light. The reconstructed brain is in a different environment and
> is presented with a blue light instead of a red light. To deal with
> this, you alter the brain's configuration so that it produces the same
> output with the blue light that it would have produced with the red
> light.
In terms of our discussion on the indispensability of an
interpretative context for assigning meaning to 'raw data', I'm not
sure exactly how much you're presupposing when you say that "you alter
the brain's configuration". You have a bunch of relational data
purporting to correspond to the existing configuration of the alien's
brain and its relation to its environment. This is available to you
solely in terms of your interpretation, on the basis of which you
attempt to come up with a theory that correlates the observed 'inputs'
and 'outputs' (assuming these can be unambiguously isolated). But how
would you know that you had arrived at a successful theory of the
alien's experience? Even if you somehow succeeded in observing
consistent correlations between inputs and outputs, how could you ever
be sure what this 'means' for the alien brain?
I would say that in effect what you have posed here is 'the problem of
other minds', and that consequently a 'successful' theory wouldn't be
very distant from the belief that the alien was, in effect, human, or
alternatively that you were, in effect, alien. And, mutatis
mutandis, I guess this would apply to rocks too.
David
> 2009/8/25 Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden>:
>
> > I think so, IF the alien brain were given the stimuli it evolved to
> > interpret - otherwise the alien might just experience noise. But, as
> > I understand it, the MGA still relies on the context of some external
> > physics to provide the intuition that it is realizing consciousness.
> > Hypothetically, one can include more and more context within the
> > simulation, but then it seems that one is creating consciousness
> > relative to a new simulated physics. It's like the conundrum of the
> > rock that is conscious because it implements all computations...in
> > some interpretation.
>
> Let's say the alien brain in its initial environment produced a
> certain output when it was presented with a certain input, such as a
> red light. The reconstructed brain is in a different environment and
> is presented with a blue light instead of a red light. To deal with
> this, you alter the brain's configuration so that it produces the same
> output with the blue light that it would have produced with the red
> light. You do this with every stimulus it receives from the Earth
> environment, so that the reconstructed alien believes it is on its
> home planet, talking to its own kind. It would be a very difficult
> task, but you could do it by careful observation of the original brain
> and environment. The end result would be a completely different brain
> in a completely different environment, related to the original by an
> enormously complex mapping, which would have the same experiences as
> the original. Now suppose that this mapping (which plays no part in
> the actual physical process of the computation) is ad hoc, for any
> given putative brain-environment system... leading to the conundrum of
> conscious rocks. Which step in the preceding is wrong? Is it perhaps
> that there are constraints on the proposed remapping, so that it isn't
> actually possible to map any sufficiently complex physical system onto
> a given finite state machine?
>
> --
> Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Tue Aug 25 2009 - 07:25:42 PDT