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Tags | artificial intelligence , consciousness |
View Poll Results: Is consciousness physical or metaphysical? |
Consciousness is a kind of data processing and the brain is a machine that can be replicated in other substrates, such as general purpose computers. | 81 | 86.17% | |
Consciousness requires a second substance outside the physical material world, currently undetectable by scientific instruments | 3 | 3.19% | |
On Planet X, unconscious biological beings have perfected conscious machines | 10 | 10.64% | |
Voters: 94. You may not vote on this poll |
12th June 2013, 07:07 AM | #4201 |
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12th June 2013, 07:27 AM | #4202 |
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Quick note to the computerists….
If you're describing a bounce-back system, a system in which things contact a machine of some sort, and that machine simply routes the response around and then produces an overt response, you're describing a non-conscious system, like what we see in flies or worms, for example. In order to be describing a conscious system, you have to be working with a machine that produces some sort of phenogram. And at the moment, we don't know how to build such machines, because we don't know how that feat is accomplished. If your machine is responding directly to the world, it's non-conscious. The machine can only be conscious if it produces some sort of phenogram and navigates against that instead. It's trivial, for example, to program a machine that responds to having a certain frequency and wavelength of light shined on a sensor by indicating that it sees a green light. Because you could take that same machine and have it report instead that it felt cold, or became hungry, or smelled hay. Right now, all work on computers, AI, and cellular automata, for example, are working in the old bounce-back, non-conscious systems. Only research on animals can be considered direct research on consciousness systems at the moment. Machine consciousness (note that I don't say "computer consciousness") will only be possible once we figure out how to build (note that I don't say "program") machines which are capable of doing something similar to what our brains do when we wake up, or start dreaming. Right now, you can get a machine to respond in many ways to light, for example, but nobody knows how to build a machine that performs color. As we saw in our thought experiment, color is not a property of light. It is a behavior. We don't yet know how to build machines which perform behaviors such as color, odor, sound, etc. |
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12th June 2013, 09:57 AM | #4203 |
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What's the difference between a conscious phenogram and a simulation in which the interpreting 'other' is itself?
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12th June 2013, 10:51 AM | #4204 |
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Perhaps. But even granting that, the biological consciousness is a process. Processes can be replicated and/or simulated.
Quote:
Quote:
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12th June 2013, 11:09 AM | #4205 |
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12th June 2013, 11:25 AM | #4206 |
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12th June 2013, 11:30 AM | #4207 |
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Start with a bounce-back system that responds directly to the external world through an array of sensors. Program a simulation of that part of the external world which can be accessed through those sensors. Route the output from the simulation through the same pathway as the sensors into the bounceback system. Route the output from the sensor array into the simulation's input parameters.
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12th June 2013, 01:18 PM | #4208 |
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It sounds to me as if a lot of people here are saying something along the lines of...
consciousness being an iterative process of the form (dd+li)**n(cp1+cp2), where dd is degree of differentiating and li is level of integrating, and cp1 and cp2 are canonical pairs defining end-points during each moment of consciousness. |
12th June 2013, 02:38 PM | #4209 |
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12th June 2013, 02:39 PM | #4210 |
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12th June 2013, 02:44 PM | #4211 |
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12th June 2013, 03:00 PM | #4212 |
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I mean the simulation would be much the same as, say, something like a climate model, but of the real world space in which our physical bounce-back device operates. so it's parameters would be the same as the possible range of inputs that could be received from the sensor array to which the device normally responds to.
I'm thinking it would be accomplished via a genetic algorithm that tests how closely the simulation's outputs predict reality (data actually received from the physical sensor array a short time later), and adjusts the simulation accordingly. |
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12th June 2013, 03:05 PM | #4213 |
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It sounds to me like you're describing a more complex bounce-back system, in which the simulation wouldn't be producing a phenomenon with the essential hallmarks of consciousness, i.e. a unique and integrated phenomenology with a single implied point of view.
But maybe I'm wrong. Worth exploring. How do you propose to achieve integration and a unitary point of view, first of all? We'll leave the thorny issue of phenomenology for later. |
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12th June 2013, 04:11 PM | #4214 |
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Well, I don't know what the simulation would be producing internally, but it seems to me that this set up would allow the system to function in much the same way that consciousness allows us to function. That it would confer the same sort of advantages that we have over non-conscious organisms.
I don't see how it would even be possible to discern what sort of phenomenology might be present, beyond that the simulation would be generating a representation of the real world against which the system can navigate. Of course, it should also be able to navigate against stored memories of previous states as well. I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean by a "single implied point of view" though. |
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12th June 2013, 05:00 PM | #4215 |
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Well, there are 2 key hallmarks of consciousness, irrespective of the mechanism which is another consideration.
You might want to check out Tononi and Balduzzi's work on integrated information theory (IIT). There's a good vid online in which Tononi gives a general description... I think it's part of a panel with Ned Block. Anyway, the first is the ingegration of experience. I'm not at home right now so I can't give you a quote from The Cognitive Neurosciences, but Tononi uses the example of a digital camera. For the digital camera, there is no ingegration, the diodes do their work separately. And in non-conscious brain processes we see something similar in the neural chain. However, conscious processes are different, and that difference is likely anchored in the simultanaitey of the synchronized oscillations across the brain which are the mechanical hallmarks of conscious experience. In other words, consciousness isn't in the neural chain. It's something different. And the result is an integrated experience. You can't simply decide to experience the color of the sky separate from its brightness, for instance, or the shape of a cup separate from its color. It's a unified experience. The second feature is an implied single point of view, which is actually the solution to Descartes problem of irreducibility. You probably are aware of this, but the problem is, if there's some sort of image of the world in your head, like a movie on a screen, who's watching it? Some little man in your head? If so, who's watching the movie in HIS head? But the model of consciousness I described doesn't have this problem, because the "movie" is you. The illusion is that the movie is the outside world, but it's not. What feels like you is simply the implied point of view produced by the phenogram. But there's really nothing there. This is the brilliant illusion of consciousness. It's kind of like a reverse vanishing point. The single point of view doesn't result from any little man in your head, or anything in your head which is "observing" anything at all. There is no observer, or even any observation. You ARE the movie, so to speak. Think about your visual vanishing point. It's not real, it's an illusion. There is no point at which the railroad tracks meet, it only seems that way. The same thing's happening in reverse. There is no point where the observer stands. That point (and the observer) are merely implied by the structure of the phenogram. Does that make sense? |
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12th June 2013, 05:17 PM | #4216 |
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Originally Posted by Piggy
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12th June 2013, 06:53 PM | #4217 |
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Thank you. Whenever I read one of your explanations on this topic, I oscilate between moments of clarity when I think you've given me some brillian insight, and periods of confusion when I can't remember exactly what that last insight was and I'm trying to get it back.
For the part about consciousness being outside the neural chain, I'm envisioning something analogous to looking at a video monitor right up close, and seeing only 3 colors of stationary pixels flashing on and off (the neural chain), then stepping back and seeing a visual subject dancing across the screen (the simulataneous oscilations). I'll look up the Tononi reference and see if I glean a better understanding. I'm wondering if these oscilations can be understood mathematically in a similar way to, say the integrated movements of a flock of birds or a school of fish. Actually, looking at it that way makes me wonder if maybe such phenomena arise from some common evolutionary principal. Are you familiar with Gerald Edelman's work on Neural Darwinism? As to the implied point of view, isn't it possible that's just an artifact of having sensory processing and language processing done by different systems that are in intimate communication with each other? |
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14th June 2013, 08:14 PM | #4218 |
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I think your oscillation comes from the extreme difficulty of wrenching oneself out of the illusion that "you" are the observer inside your head "looking out" at the "outside world".
Even once I firmly understood why this view is incorrect, it still took months of effort until I could consistently, on a moment to moment basis, know that I have no access to "the outside world" and that there was no "me" looking out at it, but rather everything which seems like the outside world is in fact me, and that what felt like "me" was an illusionary reverse vanishing point. The illusion is enormously powerful, and has been ingrained every moment of our lives. Right now, my head turns so that my eyes are pointed at a map on my wall. Am I "seeing the map"? No. It's just that when I turn my eyes in that direction, the hologram-like-thing in my head which IS me (or, more precisely, the part of me which IS my conscious self, or my mind) changes as a result. There is something out there, but it has none of the qualities I experience -- not shape, or color, or texture, or smell, or meaning, none of it. To better grasp this, it's probably a good idea to stop considering oneself and to move into a situation in which the hologram-like-thing isn't linked with what's bouncing off of the body. So let's consider our friend Bob, who's asleep and dreaming. Let's say Bob is dreaming of climbing Mount Everest on a bright sunny day. Now, obviously, the sense he has that there is a landscape spread around him, outside of his head, is entirely wrong. His body is lying in a bed inside a dark room in the middle of the night with eyelids firmly closed. So how can he have this experience? It's because one of his bodily functions is the production of a hologram-like-thing, which we're calling a phenogram, which only appears to extend beyond his body. And unlike the kind of hologram we're familiar with, this one is composed not just of light and color and shapes, but also sounds and smells and flavors and textures, as well as representations of things which exist outside his head but inside his body such as pain and pleasure and emotion. From this we know that Bob's brain is capable of creating an illusion of extension. But in reality, none of this exists anywhere outside Bob's skull. Now, is Bob observing this stuff? No. Bob IS this stuff, just as surely as Bob is his digestion, his heartbeat, his temperature, and all the other bodily functions which go on in the organism we call Bob. This is Bob's mind, which is simply another bodily function. Mount Everest, the sky, the snow, the cold, the brightness, even the bodies and voices of his hiking companions, every bit of it IS Bob -- there is no other possible conclusion to come to. But it doesn't seem that way to Bob's mind, does it? No, to Bob's mind, it seems as though all of this is outside of him. Furthermore, it seems to Bob's mind that Bob's mind is at the center of this "world", looking out into it. But in reality, the thing which appears to Bob to be him, is actually just an implied center toward which the phenomenal world points. But that's just an empty space, where nothing exists. There are two vanishing points to Bob's phenogram. One is the vanishing point he sees when he dreams that he's looking outward toward the horizon. The other is the implied central point of view, a reverse vanishing point to which everything points inwardly. As Bob surveys the landscape, looking around the horizon about him, sweeping his gaze from left to right and from right to left, up and down and down and up, the external vanishing point swivels and moves, and the dream landscape warps with it in an impossible geometry. But the internal vanishing point remains stable. Yet both are entirely illusory. Bob wakes up. Two things happen. First, his body which has been disconnected from the dreaming phenogram is now connected to the waking phenogram. Also, the bounce-back system is connected to the phenogram so that the latter is significantly influenced by the former. This allows his body to begin navigating against the phenogram, and aligns the phenogram with what's "bouncing in" so that his navigation against the phenogram results in a successful navigation of the real world. But the nature of the phenogram itself hasn't changed one bit. He's not "looking out" at the world in waking life, any more than he was when he was asleep. It's all still 100% contained inside his skull. The sense of "looking out" -- or "hearing out" or "smelling out" or "touching out" or what have you -- is still entirely illusory. And so is his sense of a self "observing" from the center. The sense of an observing self is simply a side effect of the phenogram. There's nothing there. This is the magic trick that we must see through in order to understand what's really going on. What seems like the outside world, is ourselves. And what seems like the self, observing that world, is nothing at all. The bounce-back system -- no matter how complex we make it -- cannot produce a mind, cannot produce consciousness. First, the bounce-back system isn't integrated. Now that I'm at home, I can quote Tononi's camera analogy:
Quote:
The neural chain, and the bounce-back system, cannot account for this phenomenon, because that system does not, and cannot, produce this integrated phenomenon with a single unified point of view. And it's telling that the signature physiology of consciousness isn't the neural chain -- which is involved in all sorts of processes which are clearly outside of consciousness, and which therefore cannot possibly, by itself, explain consciousness. Because if it did, we'd be conscious of everything going on in our brains, which we clearly aren't. Rather, the signature physiology of consciousness is the synchronization of simultaneous rapid electrical oscillations across the brain real estate, in the environment of a trio of deep brain waves. Consciousness appears to be more electrical than neural. I like to use the analogy of a choir. Suppose that there were a choir of robot voices (which don't have to breathe air to survive) which were all singing in a vacuum. This would be like the camera with its photodiodes, each one doing its own thing, and nothing changes if you put them all in separate rooms. But, put them in one room, and fill that room with air, and if they're singing in synch, the informational environment changes. Now we have integrated information, and the amount of information produced by the synchronized choir in the atmosphere of air is higher than the sum of the information produced by each robot separately with each in its own room, due to the subtones produced by their interaction. The signing robots are analogous to the synchronized electrical oscillations. The air is analogous to the signature deep brain waves of consciousness. Somehow, it seems, evolution has used the "junk" produced by the bounce-back system -- as evolution so often does -- to produce something new and unique. Which is this hologram-like-thing that plays in our heads. Our conscious minds, and what seems to us to be the outside world, are one and the same thing, and that is the song that the synchronized electrical activity is singing in the atmosphere of the brain waves. Nobody knows yet how the brain is pulling this off, or why this singing results in a song whose notes are colors and smells and textures and everything else that makes up our conscious minds. Finding out is the great challenge ahead of us. |
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15th June 2013, 07:24 AM | #4219 |
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15th June 2013, 07:30 AM | #4220 |
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This is a wonderful point of the perceptions, it appears as though e exist in a three dimensional visual, auditory realm of touch and kinethetic perception, we perceive and interpret ourselves as being three dimensional and existing in three dimensional perceptual space. The 'vestibular' sense helps produce this incredible integration of the perception of the body's position in visual, auditory and touch/kinesthetic space.
All provided for and happening solely in our bodies. |
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15th June 2013, 07:32 AM | #4221 |
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I suspect you are a sandwich, metaphorically speaking. -Donn And a shot rang out. Now Space is doing time... -Ben Burch You built the toilet - don't complain when people crap in it. _Kid Eager Never underestimate the power of the Random Number God. More of evolutionary history is His doing than people think. - Dinwar |
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15th June 2013, 08:57 AM | #4222 |
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I will say of the current research into consciousness what Niels Bohr said of quantum mechanics... if it hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.
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15th June 2013, 11:23 AM | #4223 |
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Now all we lack is a "No." from Pixy.
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15th June 2013, 03:12 PM | #4224 |
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15th June 2013, 05:44 PM | #4225 |
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To follow up on my crib from Bohr, I'll give you an example of how the world looks to me now.
Today I was out mowing the lawn, and it was a truly gorgeous day -- great billows of white clouds rolling in a brilliant blue sky, trees and flowers in bloom, the smell of newly mown grass and hay and the aroma of barbecue wafting in from somewhere. I used to see such scenes and stand in awe of the wonder of the natural world. Now I understand that although whatever's out there must indeed be truly wonderful, I have no way to access it, and I instead stand in awe of what this little lump of wet electrochemical fiber inside my skull can concoct. It's one thing to think that the whole big universe can produce such wonders. But it's even more astounding to know they can be produced by such a tiny insignificant piece of it. |
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15th June 2013, 08:13 PM | #4226 |
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Sooo, if a tree falls in the forest and there's no integrated phenogram with an implied point of view around to perform "hearing"....?
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15th June 2013, 08:21 PM | #4227 |
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15th June 2013, 08:25 PM | #4228 |
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15th June 2013, 08:45 PM | #4229 |
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Exactly. Although I would say, to perform "sound".
There's only molecules moving around. But no sound. That old saw has finally been answered. If we go back to light, consider what the actual properties of light are -- amplitude, frequency, wavelength, speed. None of these are directly perceptible by us. What happens when light hits our eyes? Our brains manufacture color and brightness. (True, the word "brightness" can also refer to a property of light, but I'm talking about the sensation that makes you squint.) The stone never touches the shore. Our experience is a translation of a translation. None of the properties of the stuff out there make it into our conscious experience. If both I and my dog are looking at the sky, my brain performs blue, his brain performs probably some shade of gray. But that's not because he can't "perceive" blue… there's no blue out there to perceive… it's because his brain isn't built to perform blue. Neither the blue nor the gray are properties of light. Ditto for everything else in our conscious experience. The properties of the stuff outside cannot transfer to it -- the laws of physics don't allow that -- it can only invent something new which is a good enough stand-in to allow our bodies to navigate whatever-is-out-there by navigating what's in our heads. But this ain't that. And never has been. And can't be. |
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15th June 2013, 09:13 PM | #4230 |
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15th June 2013, 09:55 PM | #4231 |
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Yeah, except you can't walk through walls.
But yes, the way we usually think of it is that dreaming is some kind of imitation of our "real" perceptions of the world while awake. Actually, our waking experience is caused by pretty much the same mechanism as our dreams. In other words, if it were impossible for us to do something like dreaming, we also could have no waking experience at all. The big differences are that in waking consciousness our body isn't paralyzed and there's a whole lot more coordination with our sensory apparatus. The latter allows the hologram-in-our-heads to line up with what's going on around us in ways that our bodies can work with. The former allows our bodies to work with it. But in both cases, the experience is entirely enclosed in our skulls, and its apparent extension outside our bodies is completely illusory. Like I said, anyone who's new to these ideas and is not profoundly shocked by them hasn't fully understood them yet. |
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15th June 2013, 11:57 PM | #4232 |
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The location of the experience (inside the skull or wherever) is completely beside the point. It's distracting to ask where the experience is occurring. Consciousness is connected with all the senses. I'm pretty sure a computer would need sense data as one ingredient for consciousness to be present, if such a thing is even possible.
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16th June 2013, 10:04 AM | #4233 |
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16th June 2013, 04:15 PM | #4234 |
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I'm not talking about hypothetical "computer consciousness".
As Prometheus points out, consiousness need not be connected to any senses at all. In actuality, of course, in the evolutionary world, conscious critters do indeed have their phenogram-producing apparatus connected to the sensory apparatus, to a small degree during dreaming (e.g. the phone rings in your house and you dream of a phone ringing, or you dream that you need to pee when your bladder is actally full). Now, keep in mind, when we're talking about consciousness, that includes dreaming. Anytime you're having some sort of "felt experience" -- that is, if color and flavor and sound and pain and pleasure and such are going on -- then for the purposes of consciousness research, consciousness is going on. The times when consciousness is not occurring are when you're asleep and not dreaming, or when you're totally "out" under general anesthesia. But it's now known that sensory apparatus is not required for consciousness. In theory, a conscious machine could be built with no sensory apparatus whatsoever. The basic components of consciousness -- what philosophers have called qualia -- are built in. A dog has a certain set of qualia, and a human has a different set. We share many in common, but not all. Dogs don't appear to have our color palette, and appear to have a much more robust olfactory palette. Cats do have a color palette, but it seems to be much less important to them than it is to us. But here's the thing, there is no all-programming solution to consciousness. Can't be done. Consciousness is a bodily function, a real event in spacetime. All spacetime events have causes rooted in matter and energy. If you want to build a conscious machine, it may well have a computer as a component, but you can't simply program consciousness, for the same reason that programming alone could not have produced the hologram of Tupac that was produced recently at a concert. computers can be part of that system, but you need hardware components to produce real spacetime phenomena. Consciousness cannot be programmed. |
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17th June 2013, 06:14 AM | #4237 |
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17th June 2013, 06:25 AM | #4238 |
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Yes, computers work in the real world.
But if you want to see what a computer is doing in the real world, open it up and look. What you're doing -- as always -- is confusing the system which includes a computer and a knowledgable interpreter of its action with a system including the computer alone. If I build a tornado box, I create a real tornado which behaves like a tornado in the real world. The "world of the tornado box" is real. If I simulate a tornado, there is no tornado. To understand that a simulation is going on, it requires an interpreter whose brain responds correctly to the virtual output. As has been established, consciousness is a real process in spacetime. It has location and extension in space and time. The hologram-like-thing being produced inside my skull by my body isn't being produced a hundred years from now in Paris, but rather inside my skull right now. If I want to build a machine that produces a tornado or a hologram, or any real spacetime event, I can't get away with pure programming; instead, I have to build a machine whose actions in spacetime produce an actual tornado or hologram in spacetime. The hologram-like-thing which is the mind, which is consciousness, which is the phenomenology, is no different. It requires direct and real physical causes, not virtual ones. A virtual simulation of a tornado isn't a real tornado in spacetime. You can inspect the actual material and energy apparatus of the computer and you will find no real tornado. And if you want a hologram, you can't program a general purpose computer and dispense with all other hardware except what's needed to run a program. If you want a real hologram which acts in real space and time, you need to connect that computer to some sort of physical apparatus to make the real spacetime phenomenon occur. The laws of physics demand this, without exception. That includes all bodily functions, without exception. If you want real digestion to occur in the real world, if you want a real pulse in the real world, and if you want real consciousness in the real world, a programming-only solution is simply impossible. What you're doing is changing horses in mid-stream. You say that the computer can produce a real-world effect, but when I say, OK, examine the real-world computer and show me, you then pull a switcheroo and move your frame of reference away from the physical world and into a virtual world which has no independent reality but which depends on an interpretation by a 3rd party observer. Obviously, neither your phenomenology nor mine is dependent on someone else observing our brains. That's why you continue to be 100% wrong about this point. |
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17th June 2013, 06:53 AM | #4239 |
a carbon based life-form
Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 39,049
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17th June 2013, 07:10 AM | #4240 |
Fiend God
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: In a post-fact world
Posts: 96,875
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