RoR: Forum

Ever read Charles Platt's The Silicon Man?

Post 21

Monday, August 10, 2009 - 8:19pm

Fred, Kurtzweil buys into the propositional model of AI. He thinks that what it is to know something is to be able to manipulate sentences. The problem is, where do the sentences come from? Humans are physical machines the experience the world directly. We make and manipulate propositions based upon those perceptions. We communicate using propositions. But consciousness, the self, is mostly what goes on when we are not talking. What it means for you to be you is the same as what it is for a dog to be a dog, the feeling of what is. The difference is that we have language on top of what a dog has. Think of the dog's mind as a 99 story building, and the human mind as a 100 story building. That last story on top allows us to see over the mountains into a realm invisible to the dog. What Kurzweil is offering is like a TV monitor that shows the view available from that hundredth floor. But the self is not the view, it is the building. Indeed, the Rabbis have it right. You do not have a body, you are a body.

Kurzweil offers us immortality because he offers us the transfer of our propositional beliefs into a machine that will manipulate those beliefs in some machine, whjle your body dies.

That's pure bullshit, worse nonsense than any believer in the afterlife ever offered. Some machine that runs a program that says "I am Ted Keer" will not be me no matter who it can deceive in a Turing Test. The self is not a program, it is the hardware, it is non-transferable. We are not just around the corner from the singularity - it is nowhere in sight.

The mind is made up of the actions of innumerable neurons. Immortality of the self will require us to replace each neuron with a functional equivalent, one by one, without disrupting or erasing our selves in the process, kind of like replacing the planks of a wooden ship, one by one, while the ship sails, without sinking it or changing its essential character. We could have colonists in other star systems before we achieve the ability to do that.

Post 22

Tuesday, August 11, 2009 - 5:44am

Ted:

I was more receptive to his 'augmented human' scenarios than his 'tranfer' to silicon hypothesis. Maybe, at most, a copy of some form, at some 'resolution' less than perfect, but I would not equate that to 'immortality' of our consciousness, our being, in any sense other than the sense that already exists, ie, the immortality we achieve when we have offspring.

But, I would never say never, because I can't imagine all future possibilities.

For example, the work that was done with grids embedded into the vision processing portion of the brain, providing a 'kind of' sight to a sightless subject. When I heard of that, I thought it just as likely an amazing example of the human brain adapting itself to a new, crude form of external stimuli and newly processing it as 'sight' information, than it was an artificial reproduction of natural sight stimuli. A kind of 'meeting more than half-way' between the human brain and our crude attempts to get external stimuli to it. "Thanks for the input, I'll take over from here." And then, the human brain did its thing...

So, I have a hard time ruling out what the combination of the human brain, plus the external products of the human brain, will be capable of in the future. Just as, artificially augmented human sight may not be exactly the same thing as human sight, a more deeply augmented human brain might not be the same thing as a human brain, and ditto consciousness in that state.

Will the human brain, where we believe consciousness to 'reside', adapt in ways we can't now predict to a deeply augmented state, access to augmented scatter/gather storage of past and imagine stimuli?

The only honest answer is 'we don't know.' Yet.

And, Kurzweil proposes a highly optimistic(or pessimistic, depending on your POV)hypothetical answer to that. He no more 'knows' than you or I, it is a highly imginative ... imagining of when yet happens.

regards,
Fred

Post 23

Tuesday, August 11, 2009 - 8:26am

Robert:

No, but it looks interesting.

'infomorphs...'

How did you like it?

regards,
Fred

Post 24

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 12:53am

Hello Ted,
Your post caused me to start thinking - again - of questions about the nature of consciousness.
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quote:
Think of the dog's mind as a 99 story building, and the human mind as a 100 story building. That last story on top allows us to see over the mountains into a realm invisible to the dog. What Kurzweil is offering is like a TV monitor that shows the view available from that hundredth floor. But the self is not the view, it is the building. Indeed, the Rabbis have it right. You do not have a body, you are a body.
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Am I correct to assume that the above implies that consciousness is a conditional quality of the physical?

If it is, then what kind of condition/s might bring that about?
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quote:
Some machine that runs a program that says "I am Ted Keer" will not be me no matter who it can deceive in a Turing Test. The self is not a program, it is the hardware, it is non-transferable.
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Is it possible that such a machine could be conscious, self aware and, maybe even falsely believe itself to be you?

I've read that the molecules that compose our bodies are replaced continuously, so that, in effect, as time passes we have/are different physical bodies. Does the above imply that the self is only transferable if the body is constructed to at least some required minimum of similarity?

If your answer is yes, then would a cloned body do the job? Do identical twins start off with an identical self that diverges into individuality with accumulated differences of experience? Is there a distinction between an identical self and a shared self?
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quote:
The mind is made up of the actions of innumerable neurons. Immortality of the self will require us to replace each neuron with a functional equivalent, one by one, without disrupting or erasing our selves in the process, kind of like replacing the planks of a wooden ship, one by one, while the ship sails, without sinking it or changing its essential character.
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If I'm knocked unconscious, then isn't my self disrupted? Upon revival, would my self be lost, only to be replaced by a different self with my old memories and the false belief that he was me?

I hope you have some insights or even hypothetical answers to these questions. I find them frustratingly mysterious enough to wonder whether consciousness isn't some fundamental category of the characteristics of existence that is indestructible, governed by its own law of conservation, inseparably integrated into all existence along with the material and the kinetic categories.

This would imply that at least some irreducible characteristic of consciousness exists in all physical entities, inseparable from its material and kinetic characteristics. The complexity of this consciousness would increase with the complexity of the entity, culminating in self awareness in the higher animals.

At this point you're probably thinking that I'm a nut who believes that spirits reside in inanimate objects. In a sense, maybe, but they/it wouldn't be capable of thought or volition.

Thanks in advance for any criticisms and insights that you may have for me.-Mark

Post 25

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 11:12am

"Am I correct to assume that the above implies that consciousness is a conditional quality of the physical?"

Yes, consciousness is a property of a certain type of body, of physical entity.

(By physical I mean simply "bodily" or in relation to one's body and the bodies with which it interacts. That we are bodies is a simple perceptual given. The theory of materialism is a complex scientific theory based on our understanding of atoms. Materialism is true, but it is a derived scientific theory, not a basic given. To be is to be a body, (a physical entity) or an attribute in some way of a body or a relation in some way between a body and another existent.)

Consciousness is a type of formal harmonic relation between a sensitive body and its environment. Our sensitive organs come to resonate with our environment in a way that allows us to internalize the form of an entity without consuming its substance. In eating, we internalize the substance of an entity without adapting its form. In consciousness we internalize its form without consuming its substance.

So, yes, consciousness is the harmonic resonance of a body with forms in its environment.

"Is it possible that such a machine could be conscious, self aware and, maybe even falsely believe itself to be you?"

Well, yes. Humans are machines, organic living machines. So conscious machines do already exist. It is possible for conscious beings to be deluded. People in insane asylums do think they are Napoleon or Jesus. And if there were some way for a conscious machine to have a copy in part of our own belief systems programmed into it, it could have the delusional "belief" that it is us, or the more rational belief that it shares our beliefs and communicated memories. But similarity of beliefs or knowledge does not mean identity of selves, any more that you and I both being Objectivists would make us the same person. And just because I believe that I know what you are thinking doesn't mean that I actually do know what you are thinking.

"I've read that the molecules that compose our bodies are replaced continuously, so that, in effect, as time passes we have/are different physical bodies. Does the above imply that the self is only transferable if the body is constructed to at least some required minimum of similarity?"

I don't think that the notion of transference of self makes any sense. Your self is your consciousness, your active or potential harmony with nature. To transfer your self (rather than just to make a copy, the possibility of which I also doubt) would require that your old neurons go off line while your new neurons come on line at the same time your active consciousness continue uninterrupted - like the boat continuing to sail while its planks are replaced. If you simply make a copy of your self, and the turn off the original, that would be like building a second boat and then sinking the first. But that would not be a transfer of sea voyaging. The first boat would simply cease to voyage, or the first self would simply die.

Maybe it would help to try to imagine rebuilding a piano by replacing each part one at a time while someone is playing the piano, yet without interrupting his melody and with the notes produced by the new keys being indistinguishable from the old. Now imagine this for an entire orchestra, playing a symphony. Now keep in mind that the musicians themselves are not separate, but that with the brain the musician and the instrument are one and the same.

"If I'm knocked unconscious, then isn't my self disrupted? Upon revival, would my self be lost, only to be replaced by a different self with my old memories and the false belief that he was me?"

No," you" are the instrument not the melody. So far as we know, at some basic level, neuronal firing doesn't cease. Recent studies have identified a Default Node Network in the brain that runs on a loop with a frequency on the order of 20 seconds. It seems that so long as that is not disrupted then your basic self stays in place. But people do have traumatic brain injuries where it seems proper to say they develop a new self. The self is not just a yes or no phenomenon, it is the actions and interactions of millions of neurons.

My pleasure to address your questions, Mark. Please do fill out some or all of your extended profile if you intend to continue posting, its a way for people to know a little more about each other's context.

Post 26

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 5:02am

Some more thoughts on consciousness as an innate characteristic of entities:

The materialist believes that consciousness is just an illusion, but then how can one have an illusion without consciousness?

To say that consciousness is real, but that it's a temporary phenomena that's generated through a physical process, doesn't satisfy me, because then it would be a purely physical phenomena, analogous to a magnetic field.

The only thing that a person really knows with unquestionable certainty is that he is conscious. Everything else is extrapolated from interpretations of their conscious perceptions.

Consciousness seems more "real" or fundamental to existence to me than this, which is why I have some sympathy for the idealists that believe that all that which exists is consciousness and that the physical world is an illusion. In fact, in some ways it's a more consistent and elegant solution, when compared to the two variants of materialism above.

Idealism doesn't satisfy me either, because all the evidence of my consciousness tells me that the material characteristics of things are real and, as AR explained, consciousness, at its most basic level is perceptual and based upon the information that our senses collect from our surrounding physical environment.

Maybe consciousness isn't conditional, just as physical existence isn't conditional. Maybe it's only the degree of organization that's conditional; so, while life can be lost, the physical substance from which it's composed is eternal and analogously, while the self is lost with the loss of life its consciousness decomposes to a simpler level, along with the decomposition of its physical components.

(Edited by Mark Ian Uzick on 8/12, 10:34pm)

Post 27

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 3:00pm

Our knowledge of both the mind and of the material arises from our direct perceptual awareness of the physical - the bodily.

Consciousness is a real existing relation between your body and its environment. Matter is the substance of which physical bodies are comprised. We are not directly aware of matter or of mind. We are perceptually aware of bodies (physical entities) in the form of their attributes. We are not directly aware of our own consciousness. To believe so is the idealist fallacy. Neither are we directly aware of matter as matter. Our knowledge of matter as the inanimate substance of which bodies are comprised is a scientific discovery, not a perceptual given.

The problem for most Western thinkers is to take the idea of matter as if it were a primary, and to substitute the idea of matter for the physical, the bodily, and to equate the concepts of material and physical. That is a common, almost universal in the West, but fatal error. Once you make that error, to equate the physical with the material, you then identify the mental with the non physical, and hence the immaterial, making mind into disembodied spirit, into a ghost.

Materialists, equating the physical and the material, come to believe that all that exists are atoms and the void, and they even have problems with the void. Atomism is as old as the Hellenes, and many people take it for granted, but as a system of metaphysics it is flawed. Atomism is fine as a scientific theory of matter. As a metaphysical system it is a mistake.

Metaphysically, what exists are entities, their attributes and relations. For something to be real does not mean that it has to be made of atoms. Indeed, what is a shadow? Are shadows real or not? (They are real, if you doubt it, ask someone dying of exposure in the desert.) The atomist has a hard time dealing with shadows. What is their mass? Their atomic weight. Such things as shadows, space, time, fatherhood, are all real. But they are not material made of atoms. They are relations between entities. The notion of entities with attributes and relations is the Aristotelean metaphysics. It rejects atomism, just as it rejects idealism. Mind is real. It is a type of relation between certain types of entities and their environments. It is just as real and as causally efficacious or relevant as other types of relationships such as shadows or fatherhood or time.

Post 28

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 3:21pm

Ted:

re: I don't think that the notion of transference of self makes any sense. Your self is your consciousness, your active or potential harmony with nature. To transfer your self (rather than just to make a copy, the possibility of which I also doubt) would require that your old neurons go off line while your new neurons come on line at the same time your active consciousness continue uninterrupted - like the boat continuing to sail while its planks are replaced. If you simply make a copy of your self, and the turn off the original, that would be like building a second boat and then sinking the first. But that would not be a transfer of sea voyaging. The first boat would simply cease to voyage, or the first self would simply die.

I basically agree with you re; the above, but ... would it matter to anybody in existence other than the 'self', and, if that 'self' was terminated, then...would it matter to any self in existence, after it was completed? I agree, according to our understanding now, it would be no more our 'self' even if it was a perfect clone/copy of our self. Our own children perform that very magic for us now, even if imperfectly, that is only figurative immortality.

Imagine our brains, our processing of actual and imagined stimuli, our organization of our perceptions of existence, are atavistically wired to value our own existence, to seek survival of our own process, and so on. That machine like wiring may be all that concerns itself with 'self.' That is, that 'self' is literally just wiring, is the machine inside of life, as opposed to the life inside of a machine.

Unless one believes we have a soul independent of our corporal wetbits/body, a spirit independent of our corporal body...

Logic, itself, is largely specialized brain wiring. I have a son with Williams Syndrome, a genetic deletion. He is missing some approx. 50,000 DNA pairs out of a particular 500,000 pair region on his Elastin gene, it is thought. We all have similar random and unknown deletions, more or less, but this particular deletion happens systematically often enough to makes his a 'syndrome.' Although this can cause specific syndromatic health problems, he is fortunately as healthy as an ox. He is a perfectly capable, loving, enjoyable individual...just, totally without deceit, guile, or cunning. So, he is compensated in other areas, but when it comes to spatial logic -- 'above, below, next to', much less, complex combinations of those -- his innate wiring is just 'missing.' He has learned to compensate by employing other strategies to deal with 'above, below, next to', and even basic math, but the innate wiring is just 'missing.' He is actually missing brain mass, and his skull has the characteristic '?' shape to it.

The 'machine like' processing nature of logic is apparent, when studying folks with things like Williams Syndrome. It is not purely a matter of the brain being a generally programmable mass of wetbits capable of learning 'anything' -- for some functions, there is actual 'wiring' that, if missing, severely restricts the ability of the brain to perform those functions--and fortunately, a crude approximation of these functions is achievable by alternate 'general programming' capability. The brain ... adapts. But, it is like, for many subfunctions, the brain normally relies on specialized 'subprocessor' wiring.

Well, and I'm admittedly pulling this out of my butt, it is possible that the concept of 'self', including self-preservation, and self-valuation, is itself dependent on some specialized subprocessor wiring-- our 'self' could well just be, I suspect, wiring -- the machine inside of life, that values 'self' and 'self preservation.' And when I say that, it immediately reminds me of a neural network with specialized weighting functions...

And when I say that, the concept of life inside the machine seems not so different than the concept of the machinery inside of life.

What may inside of mankind cause us to balk at this concept, if and when we do, could very well be just that self-valueing wiring...

Wierd; the self might be wired.

It doesn't bother me if it is, I'm still going to go home and hug my kids...

regards,
Fred

Post 29

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 4:22pm

Fred, I am not exactly sure if you are asking this, but are you saying that the only reason we care if it is our actual selves as opposed to some copy that wakes up in the morning, is some sort of special self-regarding wiring? It isn't us, it's just our biology that makes us selfish about our selves?

I can just imagine. The new ad campaign for the invaders from the invasion of the body snatchers. "Hey, folks, don't worry so much about that pod next to your bed. In the morning, the new and improved selfless you won't care!"

Why do I see Arlen Specter's face when I imagine this?

Post 30

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 5:39pm

Ted:

It's because Arlen is the prototype.

I think I was careful to paint my wonderings as a hypothetical, as a could be. As in, for all I know about how 'we' really work.

I am encouraged to entertain that possibility by observation of my youngest son, with the syndromatic missing brain mass.

I think the arguments for selectively developing 'self-preservation' wiring are consistant with evertyhing I've ever heard about selective evolution.

Surely, random variants without such wiring wouldn't last long...

It wouldn't bother me to learn that 'I' don't actually have a spirit/soul/essence independent of my body/wiring, that in the end, 'I' am just process with a wired in self-preservation bias in my neural network weightings.

Not one damned atom in the Universe shakes any differently, my life is what it is, in the Universe, as it is. It is miracle enough, whatever it is, even if it is just cold process.

Does that mean we are less special than we once wished/imagined? I don't know, and I don't know that I care. (Perhaps I'm just missing the religious wiring...)

But, where did anything I hypothesized imply that we were 'selfless?' I was conjecturing on what the physiological nature of 'self' might be based on.

Whatever a human being would be without that 'self', would be a zombie, no matter what the nature of that 'self' truly is.

regards,
Fred
(Edited by Fred Bartlett on 8/12, 5:43pm)

Post 31

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 7:55pm

Okay, if you're saying that you don't care if the reason why we think we are great is just because we are wired to think we are great, you are happy anyway, then I certainly agree with that.

Post 32

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 11:21pm

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quote:
Consciousness is a type of formal harmonic relation between a sensitive body and its environment. Our sensitive organs come to resonate with our environment in a way that allows us to internalize the form of an entity without consuming its substance. In eating, we internalize the substance of an entity without adapting its form. In consciousness we internalize its form without consuming its substance.
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I think that this is true of the thought process and other physical activities of the brain, but is thinking the same as consciousness? I doubt that even sensations and emotions are conscious activities. I think of consciousness as the non-physical awareness of these processes.

Post 33

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 1:34am

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quote:
Our knowledge of both the mind and of the material arises from our direct perceptual awareness of the physical - the bodily.

Consciousness is a real existing relation between your body and its environment. Matter is the substance of which physical bodies are comprised. We are not directly aware of matter or of mind. We are perceptually aware of bodies (physical entities) in the form of their attributes.
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So far, I follow and agree.
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quote:
We are not directly aware of our own consciousness. To believe so is the idealist fallacy.
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Here's where I have some trouble: while we wouldn't automatically understand the concept of consciousness - certainly not as babies before we learn language - wouldn't we still have self awareness even before we can distinguish between self and non-self? Do we have to have some idea of consciousness, or a word for it, before we can experience it? Doesn't "to experience something" mean the same as "to be aware or conscious of something"?

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quote:
The problem for most Western thinkers is to take the idea of matter as if it were a primary, and to substitute the idea of matter for the physical, the bodily, and to equate the concepts of material and physical.
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I don't equate them; I consider matter to be a special case of the physical: a standing wave in the ether, which it would be with either Einstein's relativity, where some theorists consider space-time to be, essentially, just another version of the either, or in the case of Lorentz's ether theory too.

I'm no expert on this, but I think I understand that matter isn't really solid things, but kinetic disturbances within a universal ether-like substrata and so it really is a form of energy vibrating parts of this universal elastic solid.
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quote:
That is a common, almost universal in the West, but fatal error. Once you make that error, to equate the physical with the material, you then identify the mental with the non physical, and hence the immaterial, making mind into disembodied spirit, into a ghost.
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But isn't to say that the spirit has no existence except as a physical process that vanishes once the process stops, disembodying the spirit in a different way, in the sense that it isn't an inherent indestructible characteristic of bodies in the way that energy is?

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quote:
Metaphysically, what exists are entities, their attributes and relations. For something to be real does not mean that it has to be made of atoms. Indeed, what is a shadow? Are shadows real or not? (They are real, if you doubt it, ask someone dying of exposure in the desert.) The atomist has a hard time dealing with shadows. What is their mass? Their atomic weight. Such things as shadows, space, time, fatherhood, are all real. But they are not material made of atoms. They are relations between entities. The notion of entities with attributes and relations is the Aristotelean metaphysics. It rejects atomism, just as it rejects idealism. Mind is real. It is a type of relation between certain types of entities and their environments. It is just as real and as causally efficacious or relevant as other types of relationships such as shadows or fatherhood or time.
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I admire the elegance of what you wrote and I agree with most of it. The parts I disagree with may be right or wrong; I'm only expressing my intuitive discomfort with it and searching for alternatives through speculation.

There are things that are irreducible, in that all other things are, in some way, derivatives of them; they can change shape or form, but cannot be created nor destroyed. They are commonly thought of as energy and ether. I would add one more: consciousness; not as a thinking process or a mind or a God or an individual, but as an irreducible characteristic of all things; something that cannot be described in terms of other things, in the same way that energy and ether are fundamental things.

Post 34

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 3:21am

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 6:52am

Ted:

re; Okay, if you're saying that you don't care if the reason why we think we are great is just because we are wired to think we are great, you are happy anyway, then I certainly agree with that.

I'm a big fan of 'it is what it is.' This is an area that I must admit, I'm not too sure that state of the art knows 'what it is.' For a species that clearly has a strong sense of self, and wonders about much of the universe, we don't really seem to have much of a handle on what 'self' is or where or how it resides. Maybe we're afraid to look too closely, afraid we will find the machine inside of life. But, being afraid to look is not really a human characteristic with much traction.

If(as in, if)that sense of 'self' is influenced by self-preservation wiring, -- by self-weigthings in our neiral network -- then, could that explain things like autism? Imagine if those sense of self weightings were turned up so 'high' that there was only self awareness, and the entire rest of the external world was percieved as unreal, a movie. When watching a movie, do we talk with the characters and images on the screen? No, we observe them, passively. Why are these images talking at me?

There are varying degrees of autism; varying degrees of self-weighting in our neural networks?

That would mean, there could be examples of the opposite, -- under-weighted self awareness, all the way to severely little/no 'self' at all. It is a horrible thought, I regret having it.

Post 36

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 8:17am

Glad ye brought that up - there is always a bell curve for most anything dealing with life matters, even if is 'distasteful' to consider that 'other' end of the curve...

Post 37

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 9:00am

Robert:

Yes, and what of really depressing things like 'depression.' We are bombarded daily with ads for chemical treatments for depression , "Cymbalta."

"Although the exact way that Cymbalta works in people is unknown, it is believed to be related to an increase in the activity of serotonin and norepinephrine, which are two naturally occurring substances in the brain and spinal cord. Cymbalta is in a class of medications called selective SNRIs (serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors)."

Is 'depression' gunk in the machine, faulty or inhibited neural network weightings in our sense of self and well-being?

With depression comes a zombie-like state, a reduced sense of self well-being.

Whatever it is, there are apparently drug companies pushing chemicals that claim to ameliorate it...with the less than reassuring disclosure that "the exact way that Cymbalta works in people is unknown,..."

The exact way that 'Yukon Jack' works in people is unknown, too.

Post 38

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 5:58am

I think that this is true of the thought process and other physical activities of the brain, but is thinking the same as consciousness? I doubt that even sensations and emotions are conscious activities.

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quote:
Can one experience sensation or emotion sans consciousness? How?
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I don't think that one could.

I think that most people, at some point, have this intuitive rebellion against the idea that their experience of consciousness is just a process of some kind. Sure, thinking is a process, but the sensation of it seems to be so much more that just the process; the sensation of a color seems to be so much more than just a chemical reaction to a wavelength of light.

I'm saying that consciousness seems to me to be more than just the chemical reactions in the body or some sort of temporary phenomenon created by this process that ends when the body dies. Instead, it may degenerate, along with the physical body to a simpler, non-living form of no more value to us than our decayed or cremated body.

When I referred to the "physical" activities of the brain, I can see now, thanks to Ted, that I should have used the word chemical or biological. What I've been trying to say is that I think that consciousness is an irreducible physical characteristic of all things, in the same way that energy and the ether are; that all things can be described in terms of these three inseparable pillars of physical existence or some derivative of them, while they, being the basis of the composition, cause and description of things, have no possible description in terms other than themselves, only our direct experience of them, in the case of consciousness and our intuition of their description that's based on science, in the case of energy and substance.

Post 39

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 6:36pm