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The Hard Problem of Gravity

AkuManiMani said:
To be fair, that's one of the few accurate things hes said in this discussion so far. That was actually a well founded statement from his realm of expertise. Cut'em some slack.

edit: He probably should have qualified that they are virtual computers, tho.
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Just about all computers are virtual computers, going back to the days of microcode. Nobody programs the bare silicon.
 
AkuManiMani said:
Statements 2 and 3 are referential statements about the list and, for this reason, it is semantically inappropriate to include them in it.
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"There are true statements."

This claim is referential about propositions (and is, itself, a proposition). Should we throw it out?
 
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lupus_in_fabula said:
And every time you stab your toe it will "hurt" slightly differently, and it will "feel bad" in slightly different ways. But usually not so much as to fall outside the formed patterns of reactions, which we tend to simplify by invoking a more general notion such as "hurt".
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But even if I lacked language, or suppose I lived in a masochistic culture with 107 different names for different types of pain - would that change the actual sensation? I'm fairly sure not. The sensation is.

The problem with your assumption that you are certain about your own subjective experiences is that there are many ways to make you quite uncertain. Just a stroke in the left hemisphere which spills out to Wernicke's and Brocka's areas and "you" will simply not know that it's you who stabbed his toe, nor might you even know what that sensation is, if any such sensation at all would register. In fact the ability to distinguish between sensations in any meaningful sense might be totally scattered. Even identifying it as an experience in toto might be gone because there is no discernible way to "interpret" what's happening at all.
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But I do not have brain damage which prevents me from

  • experiencing something
  • knowing that I am experiencing it

And hence I can be certain of the experience. I cannot be certain that I experience something ten minutes ago, but I can be certain of my experience of the memory of it.
 
lupus_in_fabula said:
I think Stuart Hameroff presented something of the sort at a Beyond Belief conference in 2006 (Quantum Consciousness). I think he worked with Roger Penrose on the theory. The audience wasn't too impressed with him however. Lawrens Krauss, coming from a physics perspective, jumped on him immediately about the QM stuff with something like: "...from a physics perspective, everything is nonsense... maybe I'm being too polite..." Terrence Sejnowski, coming from a computational perspective, wasn't that impressed either. Then there was a neurobiologist who also had some pointed criticism, and a philosopher.


I haven't followed up on the discussion though, maybe there's some papers on the disagreement, I don't know. Anyway, here's the presentation by Hameroff.
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Awsome! a good response :)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Roger Penrose's theory an attempt to propose his "microtublues' hypothesis as a mechanism for Quantum effects in the brain. I myself, am not an expert on the subject but when I first heard that hypothesis I was doubtful that it was valid as being THE mechanism the way Penrose et al. were proposing it.

The fact is that its well established that QM is relevant to biological function and there are biological processes that are being studied from the perspective of QM. For instance, QM is being used to understand the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants and cyanobacteria [here's an article on the subject]. If you'd like, I can dig up more references to studies on the role of QM in biology. The role of QM in neurochemistry may not be well understood yet but I've little doubt that it will eventually be mapped out and that it will be crucial to our understanding of the brain and consciousness.

edit: BTW, thanks for the links. I'll definitely look into it :)
 
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westprog said:
But even if I lacked language, or suppose I lived in a masochistic culture with 107 different names for different types of pain - would that change the actual sensation? I'm fairly sure not. The sensation is.

...snip...
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Yet the evidence is against your assertion that it wouldn't since we know that our "sensations" change all the time. As an example away from pain, think about the common phrase "It's an acquired taste."
 
yy2bggggs said:
It's not as bad as you make it out to be. Let's take this one as an example.

...snip...
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But doesn't this support my argument?

You (again, this is what drkitten did!) attempt to resolve the issue by stepping out one level. Instead of trying to assign a truth value to the statement, you try to assign a truth value to a claim about the statement.

So this solves one problem, in that at least you can assign a value of false to the new sentence.

But it doesn't solve the problem of it being different from all other well formed sentences, because if you do the same for other well formed sentences -- as you show! -- you can always find at least one way to make a true claim about them. The only way to make a true claim about the claim about the paradox is to step back further and say something like "it is true that I can't find a way to make a true claim about the truth of the sentence 'this statement is false'," and so forth.

And really, my argument isn't that "this statement is false" is somehow a magical anomaly vortex singularity, my argument is just that "this statement is false" is fundamentally different from all other well formed sentences in human language. I say people never come to a conclusion about it, you say you give up and give a postmortem -- same thing. The point is, we can't figure it out like we can figure out other sentences. It might as well be a foreign language because it doesn't lead anywhere.

The whole point, of course, is that I think "this statement is false" is a human Godel sentence. I don't agree with Penrose and the like that humans can always step outside a given system. I don't think we can step outside our system.

Now we can, of course, simply make the human Godel sentence another axiom of an "improved" human system, and again for the next Godel sentence we make for the "improved" system, and so forth -- but is this really "understanding" each system? I claim not. I claim that process would be identical to programming a machine to generate a Godel sentence for any system you give it -- a trivial thing to do. That isn't "stepping outside the system," as AkuMani says, it is simply generating a statement.

EDIT: I think Hofstadter says something like this in GEB, although I didn't understand what he really meant at the time I read it.
 
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yy2bggggs said:
"There are true statements."

This claim is referential about propositions (and is, itself, a proposition). Should we throw it out?
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The of the s problem isn't with the statement "There are true statements". The problem is with the context of the statement.

"There are true statements" is not the same as "There are true statements on X list of statements". If the comment "There are true statements on X list of statements" is on X list then it becomes self-referential and invalid as a statement of truth or falsehood.
 
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Darat said:
Yet the evidence is against your assertion that it wouldn't since we know that our "sensations" change all the time. As an example away from pain, think about the common phrase "It's an acquired taste."
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The weather changes all the time also. That does not mean that weather doesn't exist.
 
AkuManiMani said:
I've already presented it. The very fact that ALL the significant operational functions of the biology take place at quantum scales [i.e. cellular and sub-cellular scales] is evidence enough to establish the plausibility of the hypothesis. In fact, given what is already known about the brain, is seems extremely implausible that QM scale processes would not have a cogent effect on the neurological function of the brain and organism as a whole.
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Not even remotely.

As Tegmark pointed out, the time scale of neural events is removed from that of quantum coherence by thirteen orders of magnitude.

Unless you can show real, hard, direct evidence, I'm very much afraid that Tegmark's thirteen orders of magnitude trumps your baseless speculation.

As I've already said, feel free to present plausible rationale for why this would not be the case. Once you have done so I we will address it.
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It's physically impossible.
 
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AkuManiMani said:
But -- I do know that there is atleast one being in the universe who is conscious: me.
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Considering that people can't even tell if an event in their lives really happened or if the medecine they took really solved their illness, I suggest that you, or I, have no idea if you're really conscious or not. Hell, we can't even really define "conscious".
 
Mercutio said:
I'm a bit confused. You use "it" to refer to what cannot be labeled, defined, or described. How do you know there is an "it" there? How can you?
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How can I know anything? If I can't trust the actual sensation of pain, then how can I believe that you exist, stamping on my toe?

I'm quite open to extreme skepticism about the existence of almost anything, but I think there's a clear hierarchy. I am certain of the sensation of reading words on the computer screen. You might doubt whether the sensation exists - but it seems rather strange to me to then regard the existence of the computer screen and the person at the other end as being real and the sensations of them as being possibly not there.

Of course, it's always possible that your perception of yourself and the world is vastly different from mine. I experience a series of sensations, and perform actions. From these sensations and the responses to actions, and my thoughts, I build up a picture of something I call "the world". I know nothing of the world apart from my sensations.

Using the sensations as a guide, I've been able to allocate "lables, definitions and descriptions" of what I perceive. Naturally, I do this according to how the sensations differ. Thus I can have a particular sensation and name it "black dog". But how can I produce, using this method, a description or definition of the sensation itself? It's clearly impossible, because the sensation is what we start with.

Mightn't it be "they" rather than "it"? Or nothing at all? Is this one of those god things, that has very specific characteristics that everybody knows, except when you actually try to look at it scientifically, at which point it turns into something that cannot be labeled, defined, or described, but which is excruciatingly important because, dammit, it's god?
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AkuManiMani said:
All that you have explained and described are elements of operational logic and function. Conscious awareness is a separate issue, tho the two are related. The fact that you insist on claiming to have explained conscious awareness, while at the same time denying its self evident reality is absolutely baffling. Your seeming inability to comprehend the inherent inconsistency of your position -- both internally and with established fact -- is even more dumbfounding.

I suppose the old saying that "when one's only tool is a hammer every problem begins to look like a nail" especially applies here. You seem to only be able to think of this issue in terms you're familiar with when, in actuality, the tools you're trying to apply are not applicable.

The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear to me that your field [and rocket's related field of AI] cannot actually address the issue of awareness because it is, fundamentally, a question of biophysics and not really an issue of operational computer logic.
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See, you are doing it again.

What you completely fail to realize is that we believe conscious awareness is a phenomenon that occurs given a certain "operational logic and function." We think it can be modeled mathematically.

As such, Pixy (and anyone you ask) is required to say that iPhones are conscious -- mathematically, there is only a difference in quantity from a human, not quality. In fact, mathematically, there is never a difference in quality -- hence my own assertion that everything in the universe experiences.

What we have not said, and will never say, is that human consciousness or human experience is simple, or understood fully, or anything you seem to think we say. What I consider the experience of a water molecule is very far removed from my own experience. How could it not be?

Everything looks like a nail to the researchers that work on this stuff because they have figured out that everything can be built with nails I.E. mathematics. There is no need for anything else.
 
AkuManiMani said:
Now that I think about it, at lot of what I'm proposing seems more relevant to philosophy, neuroscience, and biophysics than current AI research. It appears that I was the one barking up the wrong tree. I was too harsh on you; my bad :o
)
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I don't see why there's anything wrong in AI research. The expectation of producing something like a human mind is probably as unlikely as the alchemists turning lead into gold - but alchemy produced some useful side effects.
 
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