74. Dr. Dean Radin And Dr. Roger Nelson Respond to Global Consciousness Project Criti

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by FastEddieB

Hate to seem pedantic, but...

...if you haven't read this guy...


...I suggest you do so.

OK, I haven't, and even if I do, by the time I have finished it will be too late for this thread, so perhaps you could explain your specific point! It we can't trust anything our minds tell us, or any sensations that they record - including readings from scientific instruments, or the speech of others describing their scientific discoveries - we reach a state of ultimate nihilism.

David

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

I didn't agree with them. I said it is an open question. It may simply be that typical computer hardware is missing certain requirements. Also, notice that I said "achieve consciousness similar to humans." Machine consciousness may be possible but different.

~~ Paul

Well, if you think the idea is even worth discussing, surely it is worth exploring where it leads!

Unless you want to argue that the Church-Touring hypothesis is false, then your suggestion seems to be saying the the biological 'hardware' does something essential for consciousness that isn't a computation (which I suspect is true).

We are then into really interesting territory - what non-computational activity could possibly contribute some vital component to consciousness (for the sake of argument let's assume we are talking about human consciousness).

This forum would be so much more interesting, if we explored hypotheticals, rather than just 'taking sides'. I mean, heck, maybe computational consciousness is possible, I'd just like to be persuaded that my objections to the idea (stated several times) are not valid. I'd also like to see something that began to look like software consciousness!

The Wolfram Alpha project was hailed as being close to AI, but useful as I think it will be, I don't think it is real AI!

I wonder what your take is on the question of whether thought processes require qualia.

David

[FastEddieB]

David,

Descartes basically looked at all the things he "knew" and asked which he knew with certainty.

Boiling it down, he said he couldn't even really know that ALL he knew was not a dream or an illusion or a fabrication of his mind.

His only certainty? Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.

IOW, the only thing he could know was that a thinker existed, since he was having thoughts. Beyond that, only possibilities, not certainties.

Its not a bad starting point - doubt everything!

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by FastEddieB

David,

Descartes basically looked at all the things he "knew" and asked which he knew with certainty.

Boiling it down, he said he couldn't even really know that ALL he knew was not a dream or an illusion or a fabrication of his mind.

His only certainty? Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.

IOW, the only thing he could know was that a thinker existed, since he was having thoughts. Beyond that, only possibilities, not certainties.

Its not a bad starting point - doubt everything!

Well, yes, I think I more or less knew that much, but it doesn't get one very far!

I think my objection is when people use that ultimate uncertainty of knowledge in a one-sided way. I mean Hogworks would have me question if I experience actual qualia while taking whole swathes of science and materialistic assumptions totally for granted!

David

[hoggworks]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Think again about the farq'. Suppose you had a whole book written like that, with perhaps a glossary of terms, each of which was defined in terms of yet more unknown concepts. What could you do with it? The entire book would be purely symbolic - no meaning at all!

David

I'll respond to the rest of this shortly, but I wanted to respond to this immediately:

This is how we learn languages as humans, David. We're given a value to words, based upon meanings of words based upon meanings of words, etc etc ... how can WE tell what a word really means if the only referent we have is another word?

(I should point out that I reject the Worfian notion of atomism of word meanings, because I think it falls apart on its face)

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by hoggworks

I'll respond to the rest of this shortly, but I wanted to respond to this immediately:

This is how we learn languages as humans, David. We're given a value to words, based upon meanings of words based upon meanings of words, etc etc ... how can WE tell what a word really means if the only referent we have is another word?

So are you claiming that a book written in that style could be understood (given enough effort) even though all the concepts are alien?

You are talking about human languages, and obviously we can relate to each others ideas because we share large numbers of qualia. Without the qualia, what have you really got?

David

[hoggworks]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

So are you claiming that a book written in that style could be understood (given enough effort) even though all the concepts are alien?

You are talking about human languages, and obviously we can relate to each others ideas because we share large numbers of qualia. Without the qualia, what have you really got?

David

Of course you could eventually understand it. I'm not suggesting you go from 0% to 100% immediately, but we go through that process, each of us, when learning languages. Look at an English-speaking person learning Mandarin; it's not like it's a Germanic language, it's completely foreign. We can do it, though, it just takes time and information.

David, you've programmed. Can't you see a similarity between what you're suggesting as an impossibility and what you had to do to learn a language? It's not like a nested loop is part of the human experience; you learn a programming language by learning its own internal syntax, and determining what the relationships are. I can "speak" many programming languages even though they are very much alien to me.

Does that not seem a reasonable comparison to make?

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by hoggworks

Of course you could eventually understand it. I'm not suggesting you go from 0% to 100% immediately, but we go through that process, each of us, when learning languages. Look at an English-speaking person learning Mandarin; it's not like it's a Germanic language, it's completely foreign. We can do it, though, it just takes time and information.

David, you've programmed. Can't you see a similarity between what you're suggesting as an impossibility and what you had to do to learn a language? It's not like a nested loop is part of the human experience; you learn a programming language by learning its own internal syntax, and determining what the relationships are. I can "speak" many programming languages even though they are very much alien to me.

Does that not seem a reasonable comparison to make?

I think my point is that when we learn natural languages (the first or subsequent ones) we have some shared set of qualia that ground the process. A child has had the experience of eating, long before it learns the word.

With programming languages, the first one is quite hard, because the world of computer programming is so alien before you begin - closer to the farq', but even there, you have an instructor (or book) to help you along with pictures and analogies of various sorts. Given a book about the farq', I can't imagine how you could ever make sense of it, because you would have no idea what qualia they experienced.

David

[hoggworks]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

With programming languages, the first one is quite hard, because the world of computer programming is so alien before you begin - closer to the farq', but even there, you have an instructor (or book) to help you along with pictures and analogies of various sorts. Given a book about the farq', I can't imagine how you could ever make sense of it, because you would have no idea what qualia they experienced.

David

In the case of an artificial system, the programmer would be acting as the instructor, and providing that level of help by defining the relationships.