BWE
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| Quote (qetzal @ Feb. 15 2010,15:25) | | Quote (Thought Provoker @ Feb. 15 2010,15:25) | | So, do you presume consciousness (the ability to have intent) is algorithmic or not? |
Algorithmic, I suspect. However, I'm not sure I adequately understand everything that might be implied by the term 'algorithmic.' |
Algorithmic is one of those words that seems like it's bigger than it is. It means procedural where the procedures are based on an axiomatic system. All modeling is algorithmic..
| Quote | | So, to answer another way, I think it will some day be possible for humans to create 'from scratch' entities that have consciousness and intent that are not fundamentally distinguishable from the consciousness and intent that humans or other animals possess now. |
I suspect it will be this decade. In the last 4 years the science supporting the effort has grown to essentially rewrite every single thing relating to the field before 2005. (some of the changes just involve details in smaller areas that were unknown before.) Embodied Intelligence turned out to be the key. Brooks subsumption architecture was a true paradigm shift.
| Quote | | Even if consciousness and intent arise from quantum effects in some 'special' way, and even if that means they are non-algorithmic, I still expect that they are properties that arise automatically from certain arrangements of matter and energy. If you create the appropriate arrangement of matter and energy de novo, I expect it will be conscious and have intent. |
Schrodinger's equations are deterministic. Penrose makes some really interesting speculation and without question, he's one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists/mathematicians alive today. However, he is truly in an impenetrable universe to the rest of us*. He will have to teach the math he is inventing before anyone can make heads or tails of it. Also, his consciousness theory is great but it doesn't mean anything to us yet because usefulness is the only measure of a theory that exists epistemologically because we have to observe to know. 'Truth' does not apply to a model -to any model- except within a larger mathematical model as a 'proof or solution to an equation. The truth of a model lies only in it's predictive capacity. Even relativity is not isomorphic 1:1. It's damn close but not perfect. And as soon as you introduce the problem of measurement which all physical continuums are subject to, you've just broken the isomorphism with the mathematical continuum.
I'm about to go a bit off the rails again here so consider yourself warned. :) Maybe preface all my assertions with a note of speculatory caution.
Penrose commits a sophomoric fallacy of trying to find the truth of his internal representation system, 'out there'. He's looking for the isomorphic points between his ideas about things and the things themselves, and he's trying to drill down till he nails a 1:1. For every non empty bin of 'out there' he's making an axiom of choice for 'in here' that there can be a bin with one member from each bin out there. He's added a homunculus but dressed him in nicer clothes. The axiom of choice itself has come bizarre complications but it's essential to pretty much all set theory.
Before anyone gets all high and mighty or defensive and sullen, Dennet makes the same mistake but in reverse with his heterophenomenology. He systematically proves that imaginations are just a real time process of a machine which have no 'place' or separate emergent rule sets by asking each observer to collect the bits of observations and model the time for themselves rather than accept that the observed is doing it. He pays lip service to the reverence and awe of science rather than communicating it. I tend to think he really is small minded in terms of being ultimately reductionist in all things (and not just appearing to be small minded in that manner.) He is Quine's star pupil after all.
Religion made a lot of people gun shy over that one though so it is easier or more convenient to add the caveat that people who want to talk about Cartesian dualism need to take the little bus because they are annoying and ignorant of what their own idea is. Maybe it weighs 23 grams. ;)
Just because religion is failed science though, doesn't mean that materialist reductionism has any more truth value. In fact, by accepting semi-arbitrary truths such as either of those, we limit our ability to see what wee don't expect.
The conversation tends to boil down to one person who either wants a transcendental soul** and is not negotiating, or someone who has taken a purely reductionist position and too is not negotiating. Atheism and theism both in my book are attempts to shrink the universe to a manageable size by declaring the accounting systems of modeling to be truths of 'out there'.
These are the truths of people who confuse hypothesis with method. Hypothesis comes from identifying potential symbolic units (pattern recognition basically), while the empirical method (descended to us in the common fashion :) via Francis Bacon) is a tool for examining the details of the pattern to make sure that you git it right or close to right. The method itself is a foil to wishful thinking.
The flip side of that requires us (if we are interested in being consistent with logic anyway) to not just admit but to explicitly state as an axiom of knowledge even that since we lack evidence that our senses, including extensions using instruments, measure all that is sensible by any means, it is unwarranted to limit our universe to what is known or what is imagined.
Either a materialist/reductionist/atheistic viewpoint or a theistic viewpoint is a statement about a truth that can't be demonstrated. Sad if we hoped for some kind of certainty I guess. Those kinds of truths are simply bigger questions than our methods equip us to address. We do, however, have methods to test hypotheses we make about systems which we can sense, even through extension by instruments. Those systems we can model and some hypotheses turn out false if we stay honest to the system. This is the fundemental discovery of modern man, that even if Godel's theorems define the limits our our ability to transcend, our method of hypothesis checking is level independent and can transcend all the way to the limits of our ability to detect patterns within which we can form hypotheses. Science is making our universes actually bigger. That's pretty profound to me
The method does have human judgment calls as we implement it certainly. But those are on an individual and personal basis rather than a systemic feature of the method itself. The epistemological issue is confounded in the attempt to categorize by the data we collect outside and the data we collect inside which are our thoughts. We have a hard time separating them yet they are of a slightly different nature and the scientific method is the best way we have to help us separate the two whether we need to be aware of the distinction or not.
| Quote | | I assume there is nothing 'magic' about consciousness. |
The scientific method left that word with no utility. If forces can act within our universe, they can be modeled and they are not magic. They are physics. There is certainly something nice about consciousness. :)
| Quote | | It doesn't require some sort of soul bestowed by a deity. The mind is what the brain does, and all that. |
even that places the absolute on the assumption about the way we model the universe. Not that it's wrong, it is the best information available to us today. There is no value as to possible future changes to the understanding. Predictive capacity is the absolutely only metric by which we can judge a model.
Science will never open the door back old religions because they are just outdated sciences. They have been replaced in the minds of nearly every person who attended high school with the rules that actually predict things. The problem is science didn't replace the rules that helped us live forever and that's been a sticking point ever since.
| Quote | | I'm not absolutely committed to any of that, though, because we simply don't understand mind or consciousness very well. If someone could present strong evidence in favor of mind-body duality, for example, I'd be willing to reconsider. |
I can. But it doesn't help. It boils back down to monism pretty quick. And there is a reason and the reason is weird. Think about this, your mind is the only thing in the universe that experiences time. With no past and no future, all the rest of the universe never knows when it's state has changed. Only those with a memory and forward modeling capacity can be aware that time is a dynamic element.
* as too is Carlo Rovelli's quantum loop gravity. Penrose can't analyze rovelli's math yet and Rovelli can't analyze Penrose's yet either. I can't help thinking that some kind of limit is being reached to matrix calculus' potential.
Link to Rovelli's big WTF? paper here (it uses the word simple right up front. It might be the biggest mathematical discovery in physics. But until somebody can figure out what the math is doing, we can only look at and go, "wow. Do you ever look at your hand? I mean, really look?" Some people may get more than others but The UC Berkley math team that Rovelli brought on board basically just said, we think it might work. The computers can definitely process the equations and spit it out graphs of sorts that happen to look like good answers.....
...and some of Lee Smolin's attempts to break it into manageable chunks here:
http://aps.arxiv.org/find/hep-th/1/au:+Smolin_L/0/1/0/all/0/1
...Look for his matrices with quantum loop gravity written in the paper near them.
** (without a hope of making any sense of the word... transcend what exactly? And too, what transcends? -the answer to the latter can only be the self symbol set I think.)
*** I think I just wrote a book here. I anxiously await the inevitable barrage of thoughtful answers that will doubtless follow this post when I return.
**** More asterisks. Just because I have the freewill to do it. :)
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Who said that ev'ry wish would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star
Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it
Look what it's done so far
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