I challenge you: your best alternate to materialism

[Belz...]

*shrug* OK, you can define it thus. And?

A simulated consciousness (in a computer) does not have a body to experience with.

So ? It can experience stuff within the simulation/emulation.

 

[dlorde]

A simulated consciousness (in a computer) does not have a body to experience with.

It could be provided with simulated sensory inputs, effector outputs, etc. A simulated body in a simulated environment... although it would probably be simpler to hook it up to a real body, mechanical or biological.

 

[barehl]

Barehl, if the human brain is not subject to the halting problem, then you, being equipped with such a brain, should be able to definitively determine whether any given program will halt.

That doesn't make sense. Computers are subject to the halting problem. As I've stated several times computational theory is correct for computers.

 

[barehl]

The brain remains a computer, by definition and demonstration.

You are correct based on the information you have.

 

[Nonpareil]

That doesn't make sense. Computers are subject to the halting problem.

Computer programs are analyzed by halting problems.

You're still not understanding the definition.

You are correct based on the information you have.

I am reminded of the Bigfoot enthusiast poster ChrisBFPRKY, who claims to have definitive photographic evidence of the existence of Bigfoot - indeed, to live on the outskirts of a Bigfoot preserve - but refuses to present it.

He is not regarded as particularly convincing either.

 

[barehl]

Is there anyone… anyone at all… who can explain the relationship between consciousness and the physical activity of the brain?

This isn't Nonpareil's fault. This started for me back when Sam Harris wrote his book on free will. I could see that the book was wrong--but seeing is not explaining. I assume people who are schizophrenic see similar patterns but for spurious reasons. The conversations I've had with schizophrenics included a number of unrelated connections and suspicions. And this is one of the base problems; you really can't tell solely from your own experiences if things make sense or if you are also drawing spurious connections.

Sam's assumptions seemed correct and his conclusions also seemed to be solid reasoning. He asserts that you only have random or fixed selection. I didn't think of any way to refute this so there didn't seem to be any way to falsify his claim that free-will didn't exist. But I still felt that his conclusions were wrong so I had to look deeper. I looked at what he said and Hofstadter and Dennett, and Searle and others. But I couldn't find what I was looking for. If someone had already covered this ground, I wasn't finding any footprints. So I started thinking about it and I realized some problems that hadn't been mentioned by Sam or others. I had to work through these myself and this led to some new conclusions. And, it kept going. By now it touches on philosophy, religion, psychology, evolution, and computer science. So, this is a problem. Your two basic choices are that I've either come up with a new theory that no one else has been able to or I'm just wrong.

Of course, this too has its own difficulties. When I've talked to people who believed that the moon landing was a hoax, invariably they knew almost nothing about science, technology, history, or the organization of NASA. They were pretty much just taking the word of someone like Kaysing or Sibrel. Now, I don't know of anyone who has the same theory I do. And, I've already mentioned the people I've studied. As far as I can tell, my mind seems to be functioning okay. I don't tend to confuse water with distilled vinegar or find myself wandering aimlessly around the countryside. I can explain why the airport hub system is similar to Quicksort. I can write a non-recursive solution to Towers of Hanoi. I can write simulated recursion in a non-recursive language. I'm familiar with finite automata and language theory. So, I'm probably not schizophrenic.

Nevertheless, without any corroborating evidence, assuming that I'm wrong is the logical course.

As far as I can tell (although I could be wrong) I could design an AI with free-will. However, I still can't say whether or not it would experience consciousness. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

 

[barehl]

Computer programs are analyzed by halting problems.

You're still not understanding the definition.

Your diligence is commendable. However, my grasp of computer science is at the graduate level. The Halting Problem is that it cannot be proven that a given program will always stop rather than running forever without a solution. Now, if we apply this naively to cognitive theory then we would run the risk that an organism would fall into a computational loop that would interfere with its normal environmental fitness. For a computer, the only solution would be a timed interrupt. So, you would either have to theorize that brains are not susceptible to infinite loops or that the brain includes some kind of system interrupt that can shut down this type of loop. Again, this is naive application of computational theory to cognition.

 

[punshhh]

In the same way that you would have no reason for suggesting that a pocket calculator is actually doing its calculations in the plastic rather than the processor, yes.

This is a caricature of the situation. It requires certain assumptions, as I have already pointed out, about an aspect of a person which is not understood physically.

Specifically it is assumed which material in the body produces consciousness and how. While failing to accept that experience/consciousness are subtle qualities not necessarily produced by the information (subjective) processing in the brain.

We understand where thought comes from.

Ditto.

You can deny this all you like, but the fact remains that we know it. We can look at the brain, see the activity taking place, and interpret this appropriately.

Fine, this is not in dispute, as I said before the brain performes the processing necessary for intelligence. It is naive to presume that this process results in consciousness, or experience. These states are produced in the body as can be seen in more primitive lifeforms, with primitive brains.

There is a difference between being open-minded and proposing nonsensical ideas with no basis in the evidence, no mechanism by which they could possibly function, and a complete lack of a coherent definition.

I have proposed nothing, I have simply not made the assumptions mentioned above.

There is no meaningful definition of consciousness, Victorian or otherwise, which can be applied to the cell.

There is, as I have suggested, a basic responsiveness and presence in the world as a living being or entity. Remember, I am not referring to self-consciousness, such definitions smack of victorian intellectual thought, in which the superiority of the human mind is sacrosanct.

We've been over this. Your idea of "primary knowledge" is not a defense. The moment you have a functional definition of "is" (and, by extension, "exists"), idealism collapses - as even an idealist cannot deny that, in addition to knowing that we exist, we know that we experience something.

Perhaps you could elaborate, I can't discern your train of thought.

That something behaves exactly, in every situation, as though it is a material universe. It has every characteristic of a material universe and none of a non-material universe. There is no meaningful way to say that it is not a material universe. By definition, it is a material universe.

This is irrelevant, as I have repeatedly pointed out. An idealist universe would result in an identical physical world to the physical world of materialism. It is considerations of its origin and basis which differs.

That is what "is" means.

It feels like Groundhog Day now.

However as we didn't go into the issue of "is" before, now is an appropriate time to do so.

"Is" is an expression of "to be", it is not a trifling notion which Sheakspere was toying with in Hamlet when he said "to be or not to be, that is the question". He was right, that is the question.

Unfortunately materialism(science) has nothing to say on the issue. It is of no importance or relevance, because there is no doubt that the things which exist, do exist, end of story.

This fails however to address the philosophical considerations presented to the thinking being, about his/her existence.

 

[Myriad]

Your diligence is commendable. However, my grasp of computer science is at the graduate level. The Halting Problem is that it cannot be proven that a given program will always stop rather than running forever without a solution. Now, if we apply this naively to cognitive theory then we would run the risk that an organism would fall into a computational loop that would interfere with its normal environmental fitness. For a computer, the only solution would be a timed interrupt. So, you would either have to theorize that brains are not susceptible to infinite loops or that the brain includes some kind of system interrupt that can shut down this type of loop. Again, this is naive application of computational theory to cognition.

The halting problem is that it cannot be reliably computed by any known machine whether or not a given program running on another universal machine will always stop rather than running forever. This is proven by postulating a machine that can reliably determine whether a given machine will halt, then constructing another machine from it by replacing its halt state with an infinite loop condition, and then setting that modified machine to evaluating itself. This results in a contradiction, proving that the initial assumption that a reliable halt-detector machine exists cannot be valid.

The halting problem is not that a machine might go into an endless loop. It is that a machine cannot reliably compute whether another machine will do so. The inclusion of "outside interrupts" or other modifications to the basic definition of a universal machine makes no difference in this fact.

If this were not the case, then many open-ended mathematical problems could be "magically" solved by writing a simple open-ended program (such as the one I described above for the Goldbach Conjecture regarding even numbers being each the sum of two primes) and then running that program through a "does it ever halt" detector.

The claim that a brain cannot enter an infinite loop (which I'll accept even though it is highly questionable; can you demonstrate that this truly has never happened in the vast history of mental breakdowns, mental illnesses, and pathological behavior?) does not make a brain exempt from the halting problem. As I showed, your brain also cannot reliably determine whether or not a given machine with a given input will halt. For instance, your brain cannot determine whether or not the Goldbach Conjecture program halts. This does not suggest that brains are exempt from fundamental limits proven to apply to other kinds of computing machine. Quite the contrary.

 

[Belz...]

The halting problem is that it cannot be reliably computed by any known machine whether or not a given program running on another universal machine will always stop rather than running forever.

I've never understood the halting problem, myself, even though I'm a computer programmer. I guess I've never had to deal with it in the past nor was it taught in my college. I suppose a computer can't check for an infinite loop unless it runs into one itself.

As I showed, your brain also cannot reliably determine whether or not a given machine with a given input will halt.

...but this, however, baffles me. I've debugged code before and I've always thought it was a simple matter of determining whether anything ever changes in the loop itself.

Can you clarify this one for me ?

 

[barehl]

The claim that a brain cannot enter an infinite loop (which I'll accept even though it is highly questionable; can you demonstrate that this truly has never happened in the vast history of mental breakdowns, mental illnesses, and pathological behavior?) does not make a brain exempt from the halting problem. As I showed, your brain also cannot reliably determine whether or not a given machine with a given input will halt. For instance, your brain cannot determine whether or not the Goldbach Conjecture program halts. This does not suggest that brains are exempt from fundamental limits proven to apply to other kinds of computing machine. Quite the contrary.

The Halting Problem is part of a larger class of problems. Just as you can't always predict that a given program will halt you also cannot always predict that code will give the correct answer or won't crash. So, based on established theory it would be impossible for the brain to determine ahead of time that a given computation was correct. So, again, if we apply computational theory to the brain then we only have a few possibilities:

1. All of the computational functions of the brain use correct code that has been established through trial and error over the evolutionary process.

This does have an obvious evolutionary problem because the rate of error would be so large compared to correct code that not enough offspring would survive. You would end up with less than 1 in a trillion chance of survival. We could try to claim that the speculative code is so small that it wouldn't impose a fitness burden however then it also wouldn't give a fitness advantage. In other words, there doesn't seem to be any way to create this code in an evolutionary setting.

2. New code is actively debugged by the brain.

This also has an obvious problem. In order to debug code you have to know what it is supposed to do. However, there is no mechanism for the brain to determine this ahead of time.

 

[tsig]

The halting problem is that it cannot be reliably computed by any known machine whether or not a given program running on another universal machine will always stop rather than running forever. This is proven by postulating a machine that can reliably determine whether a given machine will halt, then constructing another machine from it by replacing its halt state with an infinite loop condition, and then setting that modified machine to evaluating itself. This results in a contradiction, proving that the initial assumption that a reliable halt-detector machine exists cannot be valid.

The halting problem is not that a machine might go into an endless loop. It is that a machine cannot reliably compute whether another machine will do so. The inclusion of "outside interrupts" or other modifications to the basic definition of a universal machine makes no difference in this fact.

If this were not the case, then many open-ended mathematical problems could be "magically" solved by writing a simple open-ended program (such as the one I described above for the Goldbach Conjecture regarding even numbers being each the sum of two primes) and then running that program through a "does it ever halt" detector.

The claim that a brain cannot enter an infinite loop (which I'll accept even though it is highly questionable; can you demonstrate that this truly has never happened in the vast history of mental breakdowns, mental illnesses, and pathological behavior?) does not make a brain exempt from the halting problem. As I showed, your brain also cannot reliably determine whether or not a given machine with a given input will halt. For instance, your brain cannot determine whether or not the Goldbach Conjecture program halts. This does not suggest that brains are exempt from fundamental limits proven to apply to other kinds of computing machine. Quite the contrary.

Isn't faith an infinite loop in the brain?

 

[Belz...]

Isn't faith an infinite loop in the brain?

I know a few threads that are infinite loops.

 

[tsig]

I've never understood the halting problem, myself, even though I'm a computer programmer. I guess I've never had to deal with it in the past nor was it taught in my college. I suppose a computer can't check for an infinite loop unless it runs into one itself.



...but this, however, baffles me. I've debugged code before and I've always thought it was a simple matter of determining whether anything ever changes in the loop itself.

Can you clarify this one for me ?

I have to agree with you here, why can't you just run the program and see what it does?

 

[Belz...]

I have to agree with you here, why can't you just run the program and see what it does?

Not even that. You can read the code and put values in the variables in your head, and just follow it. I've found a few infinite loops like that.

 

[tsig]

Not even that. You can read the code and put values in the variables in your head, and just follow it. I've found a few infinite loops like that.

Using the wetware to evaluate the software.

 

[Nonpareil]

So I started thinking about it and I realized some problems that hadn't been mentioned by Sam or others. I had to work through these myself and this led to some new conclusions. And, it kept going. By now it touches on philosophy, religion, psychology, evolution, and computer science. So, this is a problem. Your two basic choices are that I've either come up with a new theory that no one else has been able to or I'm just wrong.

The latter is more convincing by an order of magnitude.

Your diligence is commendable. However, my grasp of computer science is at the graduate level. The Halting Problem is that it cannot be proven that a given program will always stop rather than running forever without a solution. Now, if we apply this naively to cognitive theory then we would run the risk that an organism would fall into a computational loop that would interfere with its normal environmental fitness.

Point one, so what?

Point two, how do you know that this doesn't happen?

For a computer, the only solution would be a timed interrupt. So, you would either have to theorize that brains are not susceptible to infinite loops or that the brain includes some kind of system interrupt that can shut down this type of loop.

Neither of which is impossible, and the latter of which wouldn't even be particularly surprising.

This is a caricature of the situation. It requires certain assumptions, as I have already pointed out, about an aspect of a person which is not understood physically.

Specifically it is assumed which material in the body produces consciousness and how. While failing to accept that experience/consciousness are subtle qualities not necessarily produced by the information (subjective) processing in the brain.

Except that consciousness demonstrably is produced by the information processing in the brain. Stop the information processing, and consciousness is no longer present, save when you try (completely pointlessly) to equivocate between "consciousness" and "organic life".

Fine, this is not in dispute, as I said before the brain performes the processing necessary for intelligence. It is naive to presume that this process results in consciousness, or experience.

Except that we can plainly see that it does. Take away the brain, and you have no consciousness.

These states are produced in the body as can be seen in more primitive lifeforms, with primitive brains.

No, they aren't. More primitive brains are still brains. Remove a monkey's brain, and it is no longer conscious.

Perhaps you could elaborate, I can't discern your train of thought.

It has already been laid out quite plainly.

Even in an idealistic universe, we experience something. There is no meaningful way to describe that something as anything other than an external, materialistic universe. To say that it is "really" an idealistic one is a meaningless statement which relies on word games.

It is considerations of its origin and basis which differs.
It feels like Groundhog Day now.

However as we didn't go into the issue of "is" before, now is an appropriate time to do so.

"Is" is an expression of "to be", it is not a trifling notion which Sheakspere was toying with in Hamlet when he said "to be or not to be, that is the question". He was right, that is the question.

Unfortunately materialism(science) has nothing to say on the issue. It is of no importance or relevance, because there is no doubt that the things which exist, do exist, end of story.

This fails however to address the philosophical considerations presented to the thinking being, about his/her existence.

Meaningless word salad.

So, again, if we apply computational theory to the brain then we only have a few possibilities:

1. All of the computational functions of the brain use correct code that has been established through trial and error over the evolutionary process.

This does have an obvious evolutionary problem because the rate of error would be so large compared to correct code that not enough offspring would survive. You would end up with less than 1 in a trillion chance of survival.

This scenario - and the survival requirements - are so incredibly vaguely defined that your statement is meaningless.

2. New code is actively debugged by the brain.

This also has an obvious problem. In order to debug code you have to know what it is supposed to do. However, there is no mechanism for the brain to determine this ahead of time.

You really don't understand the whole concept of selection pressures, do you?

To seriously suggest that the brain could not have evolved is a laughable statement.

 

[Dancing David]

*By primary knowledge I am referring the the personal experience of existing experienced by a human, a state clearly experienced through the medium of mind.

Assuming the mind again?

 

[MRC_Hans]

It could be provided with simulated sensory inputs, effector outputs, etc. A simulated body in a simulated environment... although it would probably be simpler to hook it up to a real body, mechanical or biological.

Then it would probably be indistinguishable from a conscious entity.

Hans

 

[barehl]

The latter is more convincing by an order of magnitude.

Based on the information you have at hand, I'd say several orders of magnitude.

Point two, how do you know that this doesn't happen?

How do I know that animals don't freeze in an infinite loop? Is this a real question? You can see repeated behavior with insects consistent with finite automata but I'm not aware of this in territorial fish. Could you give an example where you've seen it?

Neither of which is impossible, and the latter of which wouldn't even be particularly surprising.

The first possibility was my assertion...so saying that it is not impossible is also stating that I could be right in my assertion. The second possibility is clearly a problem. What would the mechanism be to detect that a given code sequence would never finish or just had not finished yet?

Except that consciousness demonstrably is produced by the information processing in the brain.

This reduces to a simple tautology: consciousness is a product of consciousness. Information processing is done by computers all the time without consciousness.

No, they aren't. More primitive brains are still brains. Remove a monkey's brain, and it is no longer conscious.

An insect's brain is not conscious. There is however a continuum of increasing awareness from territorial fish to some reptiles to many birds and most mammals.

Even in an idealistic universe, we experience something.

What is the source of the experience?

This scenario - and the survival requirements - are so incredibly vaguely defined that your statement is meaningless.

I suppose I could be more precise. The 6502 processor uses 8 bit opcodes. So, it could not have more than 256 instructions. I believe it actually only uses 56. So, anyway for any given instruction you have one correct bit arrangement and 255 incorrect ones. That's for one instruction. So, let's say that a section of brain code is equivalent to one hundred 6502 instructions. That would be one correct arrangement out of 6.67 x 10²⁴⁰. So, my suggestion that it was one in a trillion was a bit light. To get one in a trillion you would be limited to five instructions. Can you see the problem?

You really don't understand the whole concept of selection pressures, do you?

This question has nothing to do with what I said. In order for something to be evolutionarily significant, it has to have some effect.

To seriously suggest that the brain could not have evolved is a laughable statement.

That would be laughable which is why I didn't suggest it (although I am puzzled why you are claiming that I suggested it). You are the one who has insisted that the brain is completely within the bounds of computational theory. I'm trying to show you that your claim is inconsistent.

BTW, my assertion about brain code is not a restatement of the typical claim by Creationists that DNA sequences could not have evolved purely by chance. Most of the errors in DNA that would be fatal result in malfunctioning sperm so they have no chance of being passed to the next generation. This is an effective means of removing harmful DNA caused by random variation. However, I don't know of any such mechanism for the brain. And I don't know of a theoretical basis for one if we stay within computational theory.