Explain consciousness to the layman.

[westprog]

Careful--words mean things. If you delve into mathematics, be very aware that "uncountable" means infinite quantities that cannot be mapped to the integers, which is more specific than saying "infinite".

Then to make it clear - I'm not using uncountable in that sense - I'm using it in the sense that it is practically impossible to count the different possible physical systems and the states of those systems. The number is very, very big. It may be infinite, but may not.

Sure.
Why? And can you be more explicit? Of course there are conscious entities around anyway. Do you mean you expect to find a simulation of a conscious entity in my cup of tea, sufficient for the computational proponents to claim that a conscious entity is in there?

If so, can you give a better argument for it than "there's lots of stuff in there"?

I'm waiting in vain (and have been for literally years) for an argument that shows that consciousness should be in a human brain and a computer but not anywhere else.

I don't see any reason to suppose that any system is conscious just because it's complicated. Everything is complicated. I don't see any reason to suppose that any system is conscious because it is "doing computation". Everything is doing computation, if that means anything.

 

[westprog]

The film simulates motion, but we were talking about the causal relations of the entities within it. I'm not denying that a film has causal relations, but you're not causing a tornado to blow across your screen while watching that first film, nor are you causing that particular kind of simulation to run in the second film.

And that is a fundamental difference.

If the film didn't have causal relations with the images generated, they wouldn't be generated. Of course the images have to be put there in the first place, in some form. The simulation has to be set up in such a way that it will produce a simulation. The distinction between the causality of running a film through a projector and the causality of running a program on a computer is just not there. There is no fundamental difference.

The grey area of the way that a DVD generates images is a nice one. I wonder if everyone will agree on whether a DVD is more like a film or more like a simulation?

 

[Pulvinar]

You could give a child a calculator and she could give correct answers without ever understanding what the "x" symbol on the calculator meant. Would the calculator understand, though?

It's up to each of us to judge who (or what) understands what. What I'm looking for is what criteria each of us uses.

Back to my example involving only humans, a second teacher could come along and point out that the first teacher was mistaken, teaching (and using as a check) the wrong procedure. So according to the second teacher the kid doesn't understand the "multiply these numbers" phrase. A curious situation.

 

[yy2bggggs]

Are you now ready to distinguish between the DVD and the reel of film?

You were talking about a film. We could toss in tomato salad while we're at it, and clowns, and the proper way to age cheese, but all you're going to do is add distractions. What's wrong with talking about a specific thing? What benefit is there to slap DVD's into the discussion? It's just an excuse to lose focus.

Clearly the reel of film holds images in a different way to the way that the DVD does. Does that matter?

Yes, it does. In modern video games, there are often pauses in game play in order to present a little snippet of story--a cinematic. We could call this a film as well. Problem is, some of these are actually generated using the same mechanisms as the game play--and this certainly bleeds into the realm of simulation.

So, yeah, it matters.

If you read the above posts, you'll see what is being emphasized. Yes, it does matter that we talk about a particular thing, because you can't be sure an opinion is supposed to even apply until you hear the opinion first. When I want to offer an opinion on DVD's, let's have the subject come up first. Then let's have me offer an opinion on it. Then you can comment.

Until then, comment on what has been said, and stop throwing things in randomly. It's just fogging up the issue. You're only giving the illusion of having a discussion.

In any case, the images are not present on the film.

Yes, they are. They are stored in miniaturized forms on the film strip. When the film is shown, they are projected on the screen. You can tell exactly which image would get projected at which time by looking at the image on the film strip, and where it appears in the film.

The images are generated by the film, and appear on the screen.

Word play.

There's a one-to-one correspondence with the patterns on the film and the images on the screen. That doesn't mean they are the same thing.

It means they are equivalent.

There's also a correspondence between the images and an actual tornado. Does this make the film more or less like the tornado?

I don't understand the question. But if you're done playing word games, or if you're not as the case may be, the tornado itself caused a particular pattern of light to be recorded onto that particular slide of the film strip. There's a fundamental difference between that tornado and the thing that is on the film strip.

 

[Leumas]

In other words, the "world of the simulation" is entirely imaginary.

If you want to argue otherwise, you're going to have to come up with a valid argument, not your own metaphysics.
To say that the "world of the simulation" is imaginary conforms with the laws of physics, direct observation and measurement, systems theory, and common sense.

Your "world of the simulation" in the simulator machine conforms with none of these.

The tragedy is that you have to point this out in a supposedly scientific serious discussion.

I find all this Real Virtuality befuddlement quite amusing but just about as useful as arguing about whether Batman is more of hero than Superman and pondering over who taught them to wear their underpants on the outside of their tights.

I loved Tron well enough but I have never found myself so confused as to cite it as evidence for why the "world of the simulation" is just as real as the real world. I mean how scientific and serious can a discussion be when someone actually says that he wishes he could have a friend like Data so that he can have him contribute to the discussion while decrying people who gainsay the Deus In Machina as kooky believers in magic and spirits?

P.S. While I was writing this post I saw a commercial on TV for a scanner…. These are the words they used…. “It thinks while it scans and sorts all your documents for you”…. I guess we were wrong.... I mean if it is on TV it must be true...no?

 

[yy2bggggs]

I'm using it in the sense that it is practically impossible to count the different possible physical systems and the states of those systems. The number is very, very big. It may be infinite, but may not.

So, it's a really large number.

I'm waiting in vain (and have been for literally years) for an argument that shows that consciousness should be in a human brain and a computer but not anywhere else.

So that's a particular class of configurations.

Your intuition is failing you because you see that really large number, get impressed, and conclude, "surely there must be some conscious thing in there somewhere". But what you're missing is that simply the fact that some states will produce consciousness, plus the existence of lots of states, doesn't in itself guarantee any likelihood at all that conscious states could realistically pop up by chance. To even ball park this, you would have to compare something akin to the ratio of minimally conscious states of systems to non-conscious states of systems. And there may be so many more non-conscious states than conscious states that it would be as perverse to expect a chance occurrence of a conscious state as it would be to expect a glass of water with uniformly dissolved ink in it to spontaneously break apart into a clear half and an ink-laden half.

I don't see any reason to suppose that any system is conscious just because it's complicated. Everything is complicated.

The computationalist account would require specific kinds of configurations; not merely "complicated" configurations, but configurations that have relations in it behaving in particular ways.

I don't see any reason to suppose that any system is conscious because it is "doing computation". Everything is doing computation, if that means anything.

Not even PixyMisa is saying that! The computationalist account requires specific kinds of computations.

But sure, everything is doing computations.

 

[yy2bggggs]

Of course the images have to be put there in the first place, in some form.

Yep.

The distinction between the causality of running a film through a projector and the causality of running a program on a computer is just not there. There is no fundamental difference.

The idea is identical--show a sequence of images that constitute the film.

The grey area of the way that a DVD generates images is a nice one. I wonder if everyone will agree on whether a DVD is more like a film or more like a simulation?

The DVD is just presenting images, which together with your visual apparatus simulates motion. But if you see a DVD documentary of a tornado touching a ground, the tornado itself that you see on the DVD is still just a series of images simulating motion. The thing that touched ground was something... well, how shall I say... fundamentally different.

I repeat--the film is a simulation. But the entities within the film are simply portions of images--they do not relate to each other causally. More specifically, if you see a film about a tornado blowing a house away, the image of the tornado on the film doesn't cause the image of the house on the film to blow away. Rather, the sequence of images provides the visual illusion of a tornado moving such that it blows the house away.

 

[lupus_in_fabula]

If you blindfolded the people, and gave them instructions, they might be moving around and reproducing the moves of chess, but they wouldn't be actually playing chess at all. They might all get together afterwards and try to figure out what was going on, but never understand it.

Yet they could still be playing chess, whether they know it or not.

Neurons firing in such a way as to produce coherent thalamocortical oscillations at 40 Hertz will, roughly, distinguish the brain from a state when consciousness is produced vis-à-vis from when consciousness is not produced.

The neurons themselves may not know they are producing consciousness in the system – still, they are, together with their behavior, that same system. “They are playing consciousness”, if you like.

 

[punshhh]

You're reading too much into the terminology.

Take a step back. Look at what you're doing right now. You're reading a forum. The forum per se consists of posts, arranged on multiple pages. You can go from page to page. You can submit a post, and for a time can edit your own post. While on a page you see only a portion of the page--you can move your mouse to a scroll bar and scroll up and down, or you can push "page up" or "page down"; when you scroll up, the visible part of the page goes down, and when you scroll down, the visible part of the page goes up, as if you're looking at it with a window. Click on a page and you get to another topic.

The proof that this isn't all imagination is that you don't know what I post until you go through a bunch of rigamaroo in order to put my latest post on the visible portion of the screen, and read it. But whatever you read in that post is something that I put there--there's a causal relation between my typing this post and your reading it. Likewise, I have to go scroll over to put your post on the visible portion of my screen and read it to figure out what you reply--so even though I know what I type, I don't know what you type. So the thing isn't all in my head either. If it's "imaginary", then, I wonder who exactly is imagining it.

Now nobody anywhere believes that when I view your post, then scroll up above it, that somewhere beneath my computer screen your post is hanging around. Piggy might think we think that, but he's just lost.

What we do think is that there is an entire system, complete with physical causes, where every last detail--including the fact that you tend to see the same forum that I see--is implemented. This kind of thing needs a name. It's not an imaginary world, because no one person is imagining it, and the states are not being held in minds; they're being held on a series of machines. It is, instead, a large number of abstract states and relations.

It is indeed physical, because there's something real outside of your head that is holding onto these states, and the only place where real things exist is the physical world. But the forums are an abstract object. So we just call this the "world of the simulation".

The only problem here is that you don't like that term. Doesn't matter if you like it--it needs a label, and that's the one we're using. If you come up with a better label, that's fine, but I see nothing wrong with this label, so long as you believe us when we say over and over what we do and don't mean by it. And to ignore the thing altogether is a bigger mistake, because there is definitely something going on here worth discussing.

There are no special pleas here. We're just trying to tell you what's happening.

A "world of simulation" is simply a term we give to things like this forum that you're posting on right now. There are no properties we're attributing to this thing that this forum doesn't legitimately have.

An interesting point, the jref forum is a world of the simulation and there are conscious beings interacting through and with the simulation, you and I and the other posters.

Remember the post where I explained to Brainache that the simulator is merely an apparatus for projecting patterns onto a screen. Well here it is before your eyes.

The forum is a system of encoding messages which are being delivered to a simulator which simulates a board (in a coded form), which is then relayed to a set of simulators displaying the the board on our computer screens. We view the messages, mull it over and then type in another message and deliver it to the simulator and so on.

Now where are the conscious entities? They are the ones doing the mulling (thinking), if there were any conscious computers taking part or conscious simulated entities, they would have to interface with the simulators just like we do, from the outside.

The simulation, the world of the simulation is nothing more than a message board. Now if the message board included a virtual world rather like an online computer game, nothing would have changed, you would just have a stage or platform instead of a message board. And your avatar could move around on this virtual stage. The conscious entities are still on the outside as before writing and reading messages.

You could have a little virtual Piggy, a Pixy and a Punshhh walking around on the stage talking and interacting. Again it is only a messaging devise and the conscious entities are all on the outside.

Say some one built a conscious computer and bolted it on the side of the simulator at the Jref headquaters and it interacted on this stage. It would still be outside writing and reading messages. The same with software entities.

There is no inside the simulation for the conscious computer to be put (live), the stage only exists on the screens of the computers. The actual simulated board is an encoded set of instructions which is emailed to our computers, not a world.

This whole discussion of the world of the simulation is a diversion from the topic of AI. For the AI would be separate entities from any simulation in which they operated.

Likewise, this whole discussion of AI, interesting as it is, is a diversion from the OP. For the only examples of consciousness we know to be conscious are animals, not computers. Albeit animals which make use of intelligence, which has similarities to the artificial intelligence developed by these same animals in computers.

 

[punshhh]

Yet they could still be playing chess, whether they know it or not.

Neurons firing in such a way as to produce coherent thalamocortical oscillations at 40 Hertz will, roughly, distinguish the brain from a state when consciousness is produced vis-à-vis from when consciousness is not produced.

The neurons themselves may not know they are producing consciousness in the system – still, they are, together with their behavior, that same system. “They are playing consciousness”, if you like.

"All the world's a stage"

 

[punshhh]

It all ties back to the logical choice of ontology, and Pixy etal are logical; ergo, life, people, and brains can be nothing but machines. I keep waitng for Pixy to declare a computer program "alive".

Quite, any other ontology is obviously nonsense, a nonstarter.
All is machinery.

The magic beans include the concept of god, which requires either idealism or illogical dualism as choice of ontology. Damn shame idealism can't be logically defended, although kicking a rock by no means defeated or defeats Berkeley's thesis.

Interestingly the informational computationalists are heading towards idealism through the back door and they don't even realise it.

Oh and by the way idealism does have a more stable logical foundation than materialism. Provided one is prepaired to accept the limitations of the human intellect.

 

[punshhh]

The idea of a simulation of thinking being or becoming conscious or an authentic mind has to be dropped. Even though they both are processing info there is still a difference that keeps a simulation from ever being anything more then a model of thinking. Simulations are very clever syntactic processing systems, but this still isn't enough to make of them an authentic mind. The mind does semantic processing and the syntactic simulation doesn't. You can't really say it "understands" what it's doing. It is a very clever syntactic trick of the form "IF 100101010101 .and. 1010101 THEN response 101110" That's the problem; a syntactics based simulation found in first generation computers can never be sufficient to be a real mind, which is semantics based. So we need new machinery for that.

Quite.

This gives semantic machinery the unique ability to semantically understand propositions just like humans and so have an authentic mind. That's the difference between first generation computers and future computers that have real minds. Can this ability be given to a computer? Yes, but most research is top secret until it is commercially ready. And it won't be a first generation syntax-based simulation; it will be second generation semantics-based machinery. So simulation has to be dropped by definition as hopeless by design.

Yes, the conscious computer if and when it can be made will be an independent unit. It will not exist in a simulation, even if it is in the form of software. It would only be able to interact externally with a simulator. Simply because the hardware required to run it would not be a simulator, it would be a computer in the same box as the simulator.

I see no reason why some sort of simulation would not be incorporated into the architecture of the computer.

 

[Leumas]

Quite, any other ontology is obviously nonsense, a nonstarter.
All is machinery.

Interestingly the informational computationalists are heading towards idealism through the back door and they don't even realise it.
Oh and by the way idealism does have a more stable logical foundation than materialism. Provided one is prepaired to accept the limitations of the human intellect.

Quite...

 

[Belz...]

This is why I brought in the book about tornadoes. Everyone agrees that the book contains information. However, nobody* thinks that this information has any significance except as interpreted by a human being. If a book isn't being read, it might as well be blank. For some reason, people don't think this about computer programs. They think that the information, and the informational processes, have some kind of human independent existence.

IMO, the workings of the computer have the same informational significance as the showing of the film.

Even though you've been explained why it isn't so.

 

[Brainache]

Quite...

Oh please do explain.

Make sure you use lots of capital letters and bright colours.

And in case you didn't get it, my earlier post about wishing I had a friend like Data was a joke. I am quite aware that Data is a fictional character and that conscious machines like Data do not exist. I was trying to suggest in a humourous way that if such a machine did exist, he might be able to sort out this thread using a silly simplistic analogy just like they do on Star Trek.

Now go on agreeing with Punssh about how people who think that Human brains are the product of matter and energy interacting in ways that could one day be reproduced artificially are blithering idiots.

 

[punshhh]

Oh please do explain.

Make sure you use lots of capital letters and bright colours.

And in case you didn't get it, my earlier post about wishing I had a friend like Data was a joke. I am quite aware that Data is a fictional character and that conscious machines like Data do not exist. I was trying to suggest in a humourous way that if such a machine did exist, he might be able to sort out this thread using a silly simplistic analogy just like they do on Star Trek.

Now go on agreeing with Punssh about how people who think that Human brains are the product of matter and energy interacting in ways that could one day be reproduced artificially are blithering idiots.

I think you are miss quoting me here

I do expect that human brains will be replicated artificially and be conscious. Just not at the moment.

 

[Belz...]

The tragedy is that you have to point this out in a supposedly scientific serious discussion.

And yet simulated things are interacting in the simulation. Some imaginary world, eh ?

 

[westprog]

I think you are miss quoting me here

I do expect that human brains will be replicated artificially and be conscious. Just not at the moment.

It's bizarre. Piggy has been totally explicit for a long time about his absolute insistence that artificial minds are possible in principle. He's been very explicit about that. He's a hard-line materialist, AFAIAA. Yet if this conflicts with someone's hard-core belief system, it's just ignored.

 

[westprog]

Even though you've been explained why it isn't so.

Yes, there's been a lot of waffle about how one system is dynamic, and the other isn't, and one works according to rules and the other doesn't, and one is causal, and the other isn't - all of which evaporates away when looked at closely with precise definitions of what we're talking about.

What do you think about a DVD being played? Is it fundamentally the same as the simulation program, or fundamentally different? I mean, it has to be obvious to anyone who doesn't believe in magic beans, right?

 

[rocketdodger]

Any physical system is likely to have analogies with another physical system.

See you type things and you don't even understand that your fingers grasp the issue better than your mind does.

Note that you said "with another" instead of with all other. Isn't that significant?

Saying that a cup of tea has analogies with other systems is fine, nobody disputes that.

However I would dispute a claim that a cup of tea as analogies with more systems than something like a supercomputer, which was designed precisely so it can have more analogies with other systems than things like cups of tea do.

And if you would make that claim -- and I think you would -- then the question is, why do we not use cups of tea to simulate stuff like we use supercomputers to simulate stuff?

"Simulation' is a concept only meaningful in terms of the use that human beings make of it.

Then we need to drop that term, because obviously you attribute meaning to it that isn't there.

Most people consider a simulation to be meaningful in the absence of humans. Most people think a phrase like "X simulates Y" to mean something like "some behaviors of X are similar to some behaviors of Y." Most people don't think that similarity just evaporates when an observer goes home for the night.