🚀 go-pugleaf

I just found this thread I hope you don't mind my input.



dog wrote:
> 
> Jeff Baldwin <mvcs@gramercy.ios.com> wrote:
> > ... Sorry for being rude.
> 
> kein Problem.
> 
> > Let me try to make a point. Your experience is objective to me in a
> > sense. If all there is is molecules and chemicals in dynamic
> > operation, then any experience you have is mere alternate
> > representation of an identity. Looking at you, then, I should with PET
> > or MRI or somesuch be able to watch your experiences in an appropriate
> > representation displayed on a monitor.
> 
> if we can agree that my experiences are patterns of signals derived from
> neuronal cells, then in order to represent the experience you would have to
> represent the pattern of activity over all ~10000000000000 neuronal cells.
> you cannot fail to see that this is an unreasonable task, since even if you
> were to design a screen big enough to display the pattern, you would not
> have enough photoreceptors in your eye to see it with in sufficient detail.
> besides, the semantics of the patterns are determined over time in a manner
> consistent with the actual locations of the receptors. it is astronomically
> improbable that you would be able to determine what i was thinking just by
> examining the complete signal pattern produced by my neurons.

Godel gives us his incompletness theorem. To construct any device such
as this will require the axiomatic system of maths, there will be
occasions in such a system that will undoubtedly suffer from problems in
evaluating statements needed to program the device. 
	Also the degree of complexity as Dog said is huge but let me just point
out that not only do we need to compute the state of all the neuronal
cells but also construct the possibly coherent superposed wave equation
for them since, possibly, there is some quantum relations involved in
the brain activity. We can only solve the three-body problem numerically
and not analytically so this computational process is for the Human
species impossible, we will be extinct well before the calclation is
finished.


> 
> > ... the pictures I see are all there is. Ergo, your experience is an
> > objective fact ...
> 
> listen to yourself. *you* subjectively see pictures, so my experience is an
> objective fact?
> 

Pictures do not exist other than in the Human experience. For a picture
to exist necessitates the existance a Human. A picture is perceived as a
picture by Humans. Do slugs perceive pictures, do birds ?  The word
picture is a token we apply to percept we have when we carry out the
subjective segmentation of the incoming electromagnetic waves that reach
our eyes. A picture is not an objective reality it is a subjective
perception which we have found by communication has qualities that we
can agree on, this is how we agree red is red.



> > ... Would you be able to be conscious in
> > two places at the same time?
> > ... Would
> > both brainstates choose the same random act of will?
> > Has anyone ever asked these types of questions?
> 
> many times. i think, however, that the answers will only be known when we
> perform experiments. this is the scientific method. build the artificial
> system first, then you will find that there is no need to pose the
> question.
> 

The instant the alternative representation is instantiated the system is
different, the wave functions have been altered simply by the act of
observing the original. However this does have it's own problems, you
have just created a new conciousness. Similar but not the same one. I
would also disagree that consciousness is localized in any particular
place. If it occupies any place at all it is distributed acroos the
volume of the brain that the brain occupies.

[snip]

> > What makes "being able to comprehend abstract objectivity" possible to
> > a system which is totally self-contained (if reductionism and
> > identity-hypothesis are correct) and only able to experience
> > subjectively?
> 


> neural nets are pretty good classifiers, which means they are well designed
> to perform abstraction tasks. i'm sure abstraction to the concept of
> objectivity is not in question here.
> 
> dog


Now this is an interesting point. Using a self-organizing Kohonen
network you can allow it to train itself to recognize patterns in data.
( I think we can, in this small system, consider the data to be the
objective reality) So the network classifies the data. If you do the
same with a similar network ( Identical topology but different initial
conditions) it will still pick up the same pattern but the way it
represents this internally will be different. Subjective representation
of objective reality. This is the way Humans work.



This is all IMHO and in the best possible humour


Simon Nee
S.P.Nee@lboro.ac.uk