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Will Machines Become Conscious? >
Soul of a New Machine
Permanent link to this article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0021.html
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Soul of a New Machine
Business 2.0 editor James Daly interviews Raymond Kurzweil on what happens when machines become conscious.
Originally published January 1, 1999 at Business2.com. Published on KurzweilAI.net February 22, 2001.
In your book, you predict that by 2019 the average $1,000 PC will match the power of the human brain. Should we be excited by that, or scared?
It's simply a large challenge. And that's a conservative projection, by the way. At the beginning of the 20th century, we were doubling the power of computation every three years. That dropped to every two years in the '50s and '60s. Now we're doubling it every 12 months and it's likely to accelerate. This acceleration of computational power won't automatically give us computers that are as intelligent as the human brain, because the organization of the brain's resources--the way the matter is connected, its contents--is equally important. Our whole culture and knowledge base also forms a key part of the brain's intelligence. Yet this advance on the part of our machines provides us with immense and exciting opportunities.
For example?
Think of the Internet as a communications paradigm. It has allowed computational resources to be shared in very dynamic ways. For example, I am sitting in front of my computer here and it's just flashing a cursor; 99.9 percent of its computational resources are unused. Proposals like Sun Microsystems' Jeni project, for instance, and others will allow all of those unused computational resources on the Net to be harnessed into highly parallel supercomputers (see "The Power Is Out There," Premiere, p102). We already have more than the processing power of the human brain on the Net, and soon we'll be able to call on that power through computational--sharing proposals. You'll be able to apply the computational ability of the human brain from your PC simply by pulling in power from other computers that aren't being used at the moment. What does that do? Well, suddenly the harnessing of this vast computer intelligence is a much more important component of an organization's success.
Let's look ahead. How will a company need to evolve?
We're seeing a trend toward what I call a "virtual" company. Increasingly, companies will be associations of individuals who are geographically separate but with a business relationship among each other. People won't necessarily belong to one company. And you will have flexible work groups that are not at all limited by geographic location. Think about this: Most of the wealth being created today is in the form of knowledge of products with no material form. So increasingly, natural resources are becoming less and less important. Mental resources, the ability to create knowledge, to master knowledge, to control information and have access to information resources, is going to be the way that wealth is created.
What is the role of the big, dominant players of today--Microsoft, Yahoo!, Intel?
An organization could still be large, as a sort of a pool of capital and resources, but it has to really provide a kind of dynamic, entrepreneurial environment within its organization to remain viable. Microsoft already does that well. It gives autonomy to smaller groups. For example, at Word, the developer group is not a lot bigger than little companies. Basically, Microsoft emphasizes having small groups with highly talented people, giving them a lot of autonomy. Large organizations, in and of themselves, are not going to remain viable. They will increasingly represent just an umbrella concentration of information, in the form of companies of all different sizes within.
Sounds like some severe growing pains ahead.
That is what is behind this sort of international financial crisis. The business model that certain countries have been relying on doesn't work. Japan, for instance, is very manufacturing oriented. Its sophisticated manufacturing is the epitome of the first Industrial Revolution. It's a business model built on buying inexpensive raw materials and converting them into manufactured products, without an emphasis on the kind of intellectual property creation that is epitomized by Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley over the past 10 years, the new wealth in terms of market capitalization of companies is about a trillion dollars. That's not play money. That's real money. It's real wealth. I'm not saying there is no innovation in Japan, but the heart of the model is not innovation. The Japanese don't have Silicon Valley. They don't have that kind of culture. Their economy and culture don't reward risk-taking and change.
How will the role of money change in the future?
Money is a wonderful abstraction. It's really a testament to the human species' ability to give reality to abstract concepts-the concept of value. Because if visitors from another planet were to come here, they would really have to understand some very deep, abstract notions to recognize this reality of money. Yet it's obviously a very powerful thing. Everybody respects it. People can have very different political views, ideological views, religious views, and disagree enormously on any subject you might mention, yet everyone respects money. It's a pretty remarkable phenomenon.
If you look at the trends of what people are paying money for and what money represents, it's increasingly representing the value of information and knowledge. This goes back to my earlier point. Today, knowledge and information really represent technology and its power over our environments. Increasingly, when people buy products they are paying for the knowledge content of those products, which is embedded in subtle ways. So that which is valuable, that for which we will exchange money, will simply represent the power of knowledge and information.
Let's get back to the point you raised earlier about machine intelligence. Can something create another thing more intelligent than itself?
There's no reason why not. During the 21st century, the cutting edge of the creation of intelligent machines will move from humans designing intelligent machines to the more intelligent machines creating their own next generation. But this is not an alien invasion of intelligent creatures. We'll become smarter by merging with our computers. Machines are already a pretty intimate part of our civilization. If all the computers stopped functioning, society would grind to a halt.
Today, the stock market is already moving to neural networks. I'm not just talking about program trading, which involves fairly simple formulas created by human beings. Today, about 5 percent of the trades are done that way. If it was 2 percent last year and 0.5 percent the year before, at current trends, by the middle of the next decade, the majority of stock trading would be carried out by machine intelligence, not using simple program-trading formulas, but really by doing their own sort of evolved intelligence analysis.
If machines reach this level of consciousness, what will constitute being human?
The issue of consciousness has always been a perplexing question. It will become more vexing when we have machines that have the subtlety, complexity, and depth of human response. The complexity of machines today is very limited compared to a human being. Even our most complex computers are still a million times simpler than the human brain. But it is clearly going to change as we go through the first few decades of this next century. Our more advanced computers will be based on the design of human thinking, and we will have machines that appear to be conscious, will claim to be conscious (see "Big Ideas from Small Creatures," p100). In fact, they will claim to be human and they will be very convincing and ultimately, they will be more intelligent than we are, so we will end up believing them. That's still not a scientific demonstration that they are conscious. So from a fundamental, philosophical perspective, we can't prove that these machines are not zombies, that they are conscious entities; but from a political and social perspective, we will believe that, because they will be very convincing.
Is there an inherent difference between carbon-based human thinking and electronic machine thinking?
Right now, we feel that our uniqueness--our "humanness," if you will--is simply a function of our intelligence. We see evolution as a billion-year drama that led to human intelligence, which is its grandest creation. But ultimately there is going to be no clear boundary between the human world and the machine world. We've taken small steps in that direction already. We already have neural implants designed to rewire parts of the brain to suppress seizures. It's being used with Parkinson's disease. We have cochlea implants, which replace the early auditory processing circuits of the brain. One of the people I have an active working relationship with is deaf and has a cochlea implant, and I can hold phone conversations with him. Increasingly, we're going to be putting machines, computational devices, in our brains to augment, replace, supplement, and bypass neural regions of our brains. Conversely, we're going to be building our computers based on reverse engineering of the human brain. We have already been able to take clusters of neurons and emulate very precisely their input/output characteristics, creating an electronic device that exactly mimics the information-processing characteristics of a cluster of hundreds of neurons. If we could do that with hundreds of neurons, there is no reason why we cannot scale that up to hundreds of billions of neurons. In fact, scaling systems up from hundreds of something to billions of something is the type of task we do all of the time.
So we will be, certainly in the second and third decades of the 21st century, building machines based on our reverse engineering and our scans of the human brain. By 2029, we will be able to fully scan a human brain, all of that information on the interconnections and the wiring. That re-created brain will claim to be the same guy who was scanned. It will claim to be Joe and will claim to be human.
How do we prepare the next generation for these changes?
What we really need to give to our kids is the ability to create knowledge. That doesn't mean that everyone should become a computer engineer. In fact, creating knowledge and culture in all of its forms--whether it's music, writing, art, work--it's becoming increasingly important. Children need to develop certain fundamental skills and the use of language and the ability to think abstractly. Rote learning is not very useful. But we should really foster children to pursue their own talents and develop them in their own unique ways. The only way to create knowledge is to have a passion for something. People should pursue their passions.
Soul of a New Machine reproduced with permission. Copyright (C) 1999 Business 2.0
Original article at Business2.com
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Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
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Re: Does consciousness make a difference?
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I'm intrigued by your suggestion that 'awareness' is 'non-physical'. It doesn't exist, necessarily, in the same sense that an atom exists.
But there are examples abundant in nature of physical phenomena that doesn't have a phsyical existence that is 'independent' ( in fact , particle physics would suggest that most material objects 'consist' of other things, including atoms). A table dosn't have an 'independent' physical existence, but it still exists.
A better example would be the surface of a body of water, for instance : it has properties of its own and exists but doesn't consist of anything ( there are no 'bits of surface' in a molecule : a water surface has aggregate origins only ).
Force fields 'exist' as well , but 'consist' of nothing ( recent theories seem to be trying to discount this ).
Just because some phenomena doesn't have an 'independent' physical existence doesn't mean it can't have an objective physical existence : all that is required is that it has a relationship with physical matter of some sort.
I think a better way of seeing consciousness would be to argue that it is a phenomena realized by the physical mechanisms of the brain.
Consciousness then becomes a subjectively EXPERIENCED mental phenomena with an OBJECTIVE existence. These terms get confused.
Also the physical world is not the same thing as the theories that describe it. Theories change with time : we have no reason to assume the physical world underlying it does. The universe is not a mathematical object , just well described by mathematics.
But basically I agree with you that humans don't think like computers : we KNOW how computers 'think' anyway , whereas human thought is a long, long , way from being even remotely understood, or mechanized.
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Re: Does consciousness make a difference?
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John, Grant, roBman,
So far, I think these important points came together:
(Let me know if you're missing one. It seems most are related to step #1 in my message.)
* The extent of mathematical description.
* The distinction between the map (the description) and the universe (the described), and at the same time, when we look at human intelligence (which means, at ourselves), that the map is [part of] the universe.
* The difficulty of applying the notion of 'existence' to subjective experience.
* Also I was "hopping" into the bookstore for "I of the vortex".
I'm not sure which philosophical water this might bring me into, but one might say that subjective experience is "happening" rather than "existing". As in the book "I of the vortex", subjective experience might be called an event rather than an object. The question then is, with the event of a brain process (electrical activity of neurons), and the subjective experience of let's say vividly seeing a color, are these two distinct events or are they one and the same? If not, would that be dualism? If yes, would that render subjective experience scientifically irrelevant? Would subjective experience be like sugar-coating on the cake of objective reality, would they be two sides of the same coin, the inside and the outside of the same 'thing'? Perhaps not being able to find all all the answers, which way should one go?
However interesting this is, I'll be visiting friends over the weekend, and so won't be able to continue here before next week. But be assured I'll try to respond to all these issues, as I see them as being closely related.
norbert
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Re: Does consciousness make a difference?
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Assuming that there is a corollary between subjective mental experiences and neural activity doesn not imply dualism.
Some people insist it does, and generally its because they haven't been able to view subjective experience as havinga first person ontology AND a third person ontology at the same time : mental experiences are private in nature but originate objectively in teh physical world. But the same people wouldn't have a probelm with the atmic theory of matter, which is an assertion as to the existence of third party causes of the sensory data we experience eveery day known as matter : when somebody saw boiling water form steam,which then condensed to form water again, a third party description was given by atomic hypothesists for an experience consisting of visual, temperature and touch sense data - there is always in science split ontology between the experience of matter and the third party notion of its existence, but without the experience of the matter the third party description would not, of course , be possible.
This doesn't apply to matter either - motion , time , for instance, are theorised about but the primary understanding of them is through sense data. This nonetheless doesn't stop motion having a genuine third party existence. |
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Re: Does consciousness make a difference?
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As I wrote last week, I'll take up the points we discussed. However, it's now a quite extensive area to discuss, so I'll make that attempt in more than one message. I think a good point to start would be the question of 'existence' or 'happening' of subjective experience, since if we discuss the question of whether subjective experience is a 'function' of the physical, it's good to be clear about what makes us say there actually is subjective experience in the first place. Fortunately or unfortunately, I think I'll have to somewhat appeal to common sense, which is a reason I'll be interested in any response.
Perhaps it is easier (at least as a starting point) to say that subjective experience is a fact, than to discuss whether it is an object, or an event of interacting objects (or fields), or something else.
So: The statement "I vividly see the color blue" can be 'true' or 'false' in the full sense of these words. It is a statement of a fact, not an idea (abstraction) and not a belief. I see it or I don't. If I said otherwise, it would be a lie (or a test ;-). It is also a valid statement in the sense that it gives actual information. It could be otherwise. In the specific sense of seeing a specific color at a specific time, it is of course possible that the color is simply not being seen at this time.
In the general sense of seeing colors at all, it could also be otherwise. When we attentively look in a room where each object is, and then close the eyes, there may be an after-image for 1 or 2 seconds. When that is gone, we still have a pretty good idea of where-everything-is for several seconds. Our sensory organs could refresh this knowledge continuously, and we would always simply know where everything is without seeing it in color. For example when we know that there is tree around a corner, we can walk around this tree when we turn around the corner without looking at it.
So seeing in color is not an (at least not a very trivial) extrapolation of other facts, but it is a fact in itself. Interestingly, we can say so without scientific measurement or experiment, since we have direct, first-hand knowledge of this fact, hence the term 'first-person-ontology'.
Since I see only 'my' colors, not 'yours', and you see only your colors, not mine, and a third person (scientist) sees neither, we call it subjective. However, you can verify these statements for yourself, so it is "inter-subjective", if that is a good word.
In summary, subjective experience is a fact. It's not an objective fact, but it is a fact. It might be called an inter-subjective fact.
Before going the next step, I'll start a new message, and first see what your response is, and give myself some time to collect the important points.
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Re: Does consciousness make a difference?
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Sorry about the 'colours' paragraph Norbert - it was meant to have the words 'I agree entirely with you' pre-pended to it.
"What is intersubjective is the realization that subjective experience is a fact. "
By that I take it that you mean subjective experience is an bjective fact of the world, like the nuclear reactions at the center of stars, for instance.
"We cannot prove objectively that seeing a color is a fact"
This is a question that resolves around the nature of objective proof. There is no formal objective proof of anything non-mathematical - even the theory of atoms presupposes some facts - the fact is we have a willingness to BELIEVE in the existence of atoms, backed by an overwhelming body of supporting evidence - but as we can't see atoms or sense them we are left with no alternative to draw suppositions from separate facts. Not dissimilar to jurisprudence , where jurists who weren't at the scene of the crime draw conclusions of BELIEF from supporting evidence. But 'proof' in a mathematical sense of anything in the physical world ? You can forget it.
Our 'proof'is belief based upon reason, nothing more, nothing less, and the scientific method provides supporting evidence for our beliefs of a high quality ( or so we believe ).
And here we see the trouble ( which isn't actually any trouble at all ) with theories surrounding subjective mental phenomena - the science of brains is completely pitiful.
So as the quality of mental life is private, and as there is no OBJECTIVE , conventional theory of the causal mechanisms of SUBJECTIVE mental phenomena in the brain, there is a belief that subjective mental phenomena are inherently incapable of being 'measured' and so that I can't have 'proof' that Norbert, is , for example, a conscious being.
But I don't have 'proof', in the mathematical sense for the existence of atoms : just scientific evidence. And the stumbling block when it comes to arguing for the objective existence of internal mental states is the lack of scientific evidence or theory relationg to brain function. But this I believe is a sociological question as much as anything else : we have come to believe that scientific evidence IS proof , in a mathematical sense , when it clearly is not and indeed, cannot be.
When people use the argument "you cannot prove the existence of other people's mental states" what they are really doing is conjoining in an inconsistent way the two most important facts about mental states : the fact that are subjective in QUALITY, and the OBJECTIVE sceintific causal evidence just isn't there. In some sense it's true that we can't "prove the existence of other people's mental states" but its important to remember that this is NOT axiomatic but based upon the backwardness of brain science, coupled with a confusion over the QUALITY of mental states.
Its my belief that in time , as brain science improves, these notions of the 'unprovability' of internal mental states will disappear.
So as the basis of our 'proofs' is belief based upon reason, in the absence of useful brain science our conclusions must be drawn from reasoning.
(i) Is John conscious ?
(ii) If yes, does John believe in the existnce of an external world populated by being similar to himself ( there is no 'proof' for either of these facts, incidentally )
(iii) If yes, does John consider himself, or has he had any reason to consider himself, a particlarly special example of the human race ?
(iv) If no, is is therefore reasonable to assume that Norberts' mental life is similar to his own ?
The answer to this I believe is "yes" - I can'ty make an OBJECTIVE case for my own basic uniqueness, so I have to assume that Norbert is conscious too, as I am.
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Correlation (Re: Does consciousness make a difference?)
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Ok, let's talk about correlation. ;-)
The 3D image which we see (subjectively) obviously contains a lot of information about the outer world. That's why we call it perception. As far as I understand, light is reflected by objects, focused by the optical eye and transformed into nerve impulses in the retina, which are then processed in the brain by electro(chemical) activity of neurons, and somehow stored in memory. Certain medical tests indicate that our subjective experience isn't based on the eye directly, but on more or less specific brain processes. So the shape and form, the metrics, of this 3D image are obviously correlated to brain processes. Which color we see at a certain point correlates (of course) to the frequency of light via something like the firing patterns of a group or specific neurons.
However there are also aspects for which there are no correlations: That we have 'subjective seeing' at all (rather than just knowing where-things-are), and how a color looks subjectively. Also the virtual space that we experience seems to have such characteristics, but that's probably really difficult to grasp. When I say "how a color looks", I mean that blue looks like blue and red looks like red. Why shouldn't blue look like red and red look like blue? How could we verify that the color you call blue looks the same to you as the color that I call blue looks to me? Perhaps there is someone who sees with the experience of (what I call) sound and hears in (what I call) colors, these two qualities of subjective experience being exchanged? Maybe it's random and half the population experiences it one way, and the other half of the population the other way, and at the same time the brain processes might be identical. How could we tell it is not so, or who would be in which group?
As these characteristics are qualities rather than quantities, I'd say there are non-mathematical variables in subjective experience. Certainly there are variables. Or not?
Consider the following less-than-perfect analogy: a 3 dimensional structure is projected onto a 2 dimensional surface. The projection on the 2D-surface provides the information for a mathematical-physical description, ignoring for the moment what the 3rd dimension might be. The 2D-description would have accurate information, but not all the information. If the 3D-structure is flat or parallel (all the objects have the same height), then there would be no important information lost, and the 3D-structure would be well-described by the 2D-description. However, if the information in the 3rd dimension is non-trivial, the 2D-description would be incomplete in a way that matters.
This, I'd say, is probably the case for all living beings, and certainly it is so for human beings.
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Re: Correlation (Re: Does consciousness make a difference?)
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I think I explained before that there are two senses in which onecan look at subjective mental experiences : objectively ( third person, universal cause ) and subjectively ( first person EFFECTS ).
As you rightly pouint out ( and as I'd pointed out in the previos email as a supportive point ) the experience of red is red - pure semantic , an experience with no content.
ALl the primary colors are the same. This is the evidence, were it needed , to be very suspicious abou the notion that the brain has just 'processes' of a mathematical kind - the experience of blue would have to be 'connected' to some other experiernce , which it clearly is not. The experience of blue is semantical ONLY - inplying that subjective mental experiences cannot be rooted in 'software' which has only formal, symbolic content ( syntax ) and must be connected to core pheneomena with 'absolute' meaning'.
The same goes for ermotional content - anger, fear, love etc can only really be experienced - they are semantical only.
I think you think Norbert, that I am disagreeing with you on the notion of the quality of mental states but I am not. What I think I haven't pointed out clearly enough to you is that there is a difference between the EXPERIENCE of subjective mental activity ( which as you rightly point out is qualitative ) and its OBJECTIVE existence in nature. It maye be EXPERIRNCED subjectively , but these EXPERIERNCES have an OBEJCTIVE cause in brain processes. Where I would differ with most of the people on these pages is the NATURE of those brain processes. They would say brain processes are computer prograns : I would say the brain is a physical object in the real world that produces physical phenomena in the real world, namely suibjective mental states. And it would appear that , from our probing of brains and our current understanding ( poor as it is ) that these mental states correspond to firings of neurons in the complex physical matter of the brain. Quite where , and at what point of neural activity , in whar kind of physical environment , mere chemical objects start to develop sentience is the current target of a great deal of research . |
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Q.E.D. (Re: Does consciousness make a difference?)
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Yes, you have explained before that you see subjective experience merely as "EFFECTS" of brain physics, but it seems to me that you missed the point of my responses. Also, we are using some terms differently.
Since for you subjective experience is flatly the effect of brain physics, you don't see much of a point to talk about this 'effect' in itself. However, it has been one of the crucial points of my discussion to show that there is much more than just an 'effect', and so when I use the term 'subjective experience' (or seeing-in-color), I'm referring directly to just what you call 'EFFECT', only this, examining it in itself.
The explanations you have given flatly pre-assume the very point I've been discussing in my previous messages. Speaking in the analogy of my last message, you are stating (so to say 'a priori') that there is no relevant information in the "3rd dimension" of this analogy.
As a side note, I'm not sure whether you are aware of my point that 'physical' implies 'mathematical': Todays laws of physics are formulated as mathematical relationships between (measurable) quantities. 'Physical' is generally understood in the context of the science of physics, meaning that there is nothing else (relevant) to the 'physical' than what the mathematical laws of physics are reflecting (at least in principle, of course new laws are expected to be discovered continually.)
As far as I can tell from the philosophical literature I've come across, quite a good amount of it states that subjective experience is not much of itself (for example Dennett's "Consciousness explained"). My view is that this impression is based on the attempt to 'measure' subjective experience against 'objective' criteria. My personal impression is that many thought-experiments, the way they are presented for example by Dennett, simply miss the point of what might constitute a non-trivial characteristic of subjective experience in itself. Also, that there actually 'is' subjective experience, and that this is a meaningful statement of a fact, seems to be generally under-acknowledged (apparent for example in quotes of Wittgenstein). These are points which I have addressed in my previous messages.
Also I think I have now addressed all the "important points" that I have promised to respond to early in this discussion. From my point of view, the state of this discussion is "q.e.d.", as my mathematics teacher asked us to write when we had completed our line of conclusive reasoning.
Between us two, I think, the crucial point to discuss would be (if we want to continue) whether 'subjective experience' is just an 'effect', or a non-trivial, non-physical dimension to the world which is our live.
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Re: Q.E.D. (Re: Does consciousness make a difference?)
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If you read my posts Norbert you'll see that I've been talking about the 'effect in itself' non-stop since the start of this duiscussion.
I KNOW mental effects are subjective, qualitative and non-mathematical. I have been arguing this fact on these pages for months as the basis for the belief on my part that mental effects cannot be the result of the effects of mathematical objects such as computer programs. Consciosness is a natural phenomena, not a mathematical object, and the ontology of mathematical objects will not allow the creation of physical phenomena from computer programs : such an assertion is absurd. The consequences of this absurdity for some AI enthusiasts like Dennett, is to assert, quite simply , that conscisoness and mental phenemona don't exist ( or are 'illusions'- a very clever illusion - sounds like consciousness to me ).
For your part it appears you have made another classic AI assumption - that matter itself consists of mathematical objects, when it does not. Your definition of physics is plain wrong.
Matter consists of matter. Matter is not a mathematical object.That matter which is understood and known about has been theorised astonishing succesfully using mathematics , but that does not make matter inherently mathematical : it makes our models of matter inherently so. That matter is not mathematical is why physics cannot cease to be, as scientifioc proof and mathematical proof are not the same thing.
There IS something special about the 'effect in itself' - I have been arguing this for a long time. But there are two salient facts that you still have not digested
(i) The quality of mental effects is in an ontology of mental effects
(ii) The causality of mental effects is not in the same ontology as that of the 'quality of mental effects' - it is in the ontology of the phsyical realm - mental pheneomena exist in the universe and are caused by it, or if they don't can you tell exactly whereabout you are sitting when you write your emails ? Where are your effects residing ? Had a real-world, phsyical drink of alcohol recently ? Did you notice any difference between your pre-drink state and post drink state ? The only differnce was caused by the change in the phsyical environment of your brain - so you must admit there has to be a connection somewhere !
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Re: Q.E.D. (Re: Does consciousness make a difference?)
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John, let me try to clarify how well I understand your points. Actually, I was surprised to read that you also consider it impossible that a computer program produces mental effects (maybe I shouldn't say that as a software engineer). So we agree on more than I thought, although I'm really not fond of the term 'mental effects' since I don't see these as 'effects'. I'm aware (and appreciate) however that we agree on subjective experience being qualitative and non-mathematical. When you are talking about "ontology of mental effects", I assume you are referring to the so-called first-person ontology.
John, of course I'm aware of the difference between 'laws of physics' and 'physical reality'. (I wonder why nobody suspects dualism right here ;-)
Let's take an electrical field as an example. I must take it that you are trying to point out that its nature is not 'mathematical', but 'electrical'. I assure you, I understand that. In your first response to me, you wrote: "The universe is not a mathematical object, just well described by mathematics". So when I say that subjective experience is non-physical because it is non-mathematical, perhaps you would prefer me to say "Subjective experience is not well described by mathematics and therefore also not well described by the laws of physics" ? Or when I say "physical implies mathematical", you would prefer me to say "being-well-described-by-the-laws-of-physics implies being-well-described-by-mathematics" ? Do you think that when I'm writing that subjective experience is non-mathematical, that that would also apply to electrical fields since they are electrical rather than mathematical? In this case I would have to ask you to re-read all my messages.
Let me examine the comparison to electrical fields further.
One might think that in the same way that mathematics can't describe blueness, they also can't describe electricalness, so there would be no difference (except for the additional first-person ontology). One might think that in the same way that mathematics might describe the amount of blue in a color, rather than what blueness is, mathematics also describe only the strength of an electrical field, not what electricalness is. Then the only difference would be the first-person ontology. Again, that fully misses the point, and again I would have to ask you to re-read all my messages. But this mistake would be much harder to understand, especially, I guess, if one has developed a habit of thinking this way. We haven't talked at all about what blueness 'is', at least I haven't. What I'm referring to is what blue 'looks like', to you or me. Blueness means to me what blue looks like to a human being, not what it 'is'. (Hopefully I could express this clearly, I haven't talked much about this point explicitly.)
Once we have clarified all this, we can then talk about your beverages. ;-) |
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Re: Q.E.D. (Re: Does consciousness make a difference?)
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Norbert - I'be neen talking about what'blueness' is, believe me !
Blueness is qualitative - it has no consistentcy - it is all semantic. It can't be 'summed' from other componenents. The primary colors as EXPERIENCE are a good example of why brains can't be computer programs - what is the experience of red other than red ? How do you explain red to a blind man who's never been able to see ? Simple, you can't - and that's the nature of subjective mentality. How do you describe the feeling of fear to somebody who's never had it ? Simple, you can't - and emotions are similar to color experiences, in being irreducible.
I think you are close to the point I'm trying to make. Physics is a correspondent discipline : its actually less informative than a lot of people think. It tells us about the behviour of the phsyical world rather that what the world actually is. We know matter is 'mass-energy', according to current theory, but what is 'mass-energy' ? Pass - the predicate is never a possibility in Physics. So your example is a good one - physics tells us what electrical fields do , not what they are. And that 'do' theory of electrical fields originated from oobserving actual fields in practice. Electrical fields were not predicted , not 'caused' by anything , yet have features that can be measured and which allow a mathematcial analysis.
We have never found what 'causes' electrical fields, in a sense, but even if we did it would have to lead to a decomposition into another 'vector' ( particles, force fields ) that have no 'cause' in themselves. The 'IS' question is never answered by physics , and its imoportant to remember this, as othewise one may be inclined to think of the world as a mathematcal rather than phsyical entity.
Similarly by observing the brain we know that the firings of neurons and neural activity have massive impact upon subjective mental states. We know that changing the chemical environemnt of the brain causes severe changes in the pattern of neural firngs and the subsequent subjective mental effects. We know that some chemicals act as neurotransimtters and their deficiency or excess can lead to distorted mental states such as depression. If we take the general scientific principle of correspondence ( used in physics as much as anywhere else ) to connect the brain's activity to subjective mental states, it will be clearer, I believe, to see what third party observables ( neural firings, electrical brain activity ) correspond with the existence of subejctive effects.
We can't account for the NATURE of the subjective effects in themselves ( we can't 'create' subjective mental effects from 'summing' the activity of neural firings ) we can only use correspondence between the third person, observable ontological factors ( neural firings ) and the first person experiential ontological factors. You can't make apples out of oranges : we can't use third party mathematical/physical nmodels to generate or deduce first party/subjective mental phenomena( I think this is actually your whole point ) . But you don't have to - all we are doing here is confusing the need for an actual compositional theory of 'subjective mentality' that we wouldn't require of, say, an electrial field- we don't need compositional theories of electrical fields in place in order to be able to study them. We know how to 'produce' ( a better word would be something like 'localise' ) them and how to tweak them in order to get measurements : but we don't know what they actually ARE ( answer I suppose , is that they ARE what they ARE ) Subjective mentality is no different : its associations are with brains. We don't need to know more than that to study it. The science will reveal itself with further study - and this is the main problem - with the science in the dark, silly therories like strong AI or religious theories like dualism can run rampant without any real constraints .
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Re: No beverages yet
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John, first, when you use the term 'mental effects', you are presupposing the very point I'm discussing. Before I would discuss 'mental' in general, I want to stick to examining subjective experience of 'perception' for a long way. Otherwise, I don't mind switching to your 'format' for a moment:
about (i): I don't see how the 'creation' of subjective experience makes the difference between dualism and non-dualism, once it's there. The point I'm discussing is whether this subjectiveness is trivial or non-trivial. I see awareness as one or more additional non-trivial dimension(s) to the one and only world which is our life, as I have already written.
about (ii): I think the answer is yes. Just like, as you say, a computer program can't produce an electrical field - without help, in the same way the physical forces gravity, strong and weak kernel force, and electro-magnetic force (or any other force which is well-described mathematically) can't produce awareness or subjective experience - without help.
about (iii): I think it can't be completely understood from the third-person view, and some (who knows how many) aspects can't be understood from the third person view at all. It requires careful study from the first person view.
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The extent of correlation
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John, the question of correlation is a very interesting one, and revealing in terms of the relationship between subjective experience, the brain, and the laws of physics. As I've written, in perception there is obvious correlation. I agree with you that chemical factors influence not only perception, but also mental processes (slowing down reaction time, for example). That is also obvious in the practical sense, and science has given us a lot of information in these matters. I would assume that there is a broad range of correlations, including in the mental events or processes of thinking, remembering, etc.
So I'm not trying to discount this, yet discussing the question whether there are also areas which are not conceptually covered by the model of correlation.
With your example that "one cannot explain the color blue to a blind man", we agree that a mathematical model cannot describe the qualitative aspects of subjective experience, such as what the color blue looks like to you or me. We also agree that the complexity of a computer program in itself will not magically create something like either an electrical field or subjective experience. That goes a long way.
The obvious correlation between what the light coming to our eyes, its processing in the brain, and subjective experience extends only to the selection of the color, not to what the color looks like to the person. To illustrate this a bit, consider that our bodies are similar, but not exactly the same. Our eyes are a bit different, our ears are a bit different, and so on. So it seems very possible that also our subjective experience may differ a bit. At the same point of a 3D-image we see, we will both call the color we see at that point "blue", but your experience of seeing-blue may be a bit different than my experience of seeing-blue. This difference would not necessarily be in the color-space it could also be like the difference between color and sound, a little bit, even though it's difficult to imagine for either one of us. I'll have to admit that you could say that any such difference could theoretically be correlated to a corresponding difference in neuronal events, which in turn might be describable mathematically in terms of physics.
However, there is no imaginable way to verify this hypothesis, neither today nor in the future. The reason being that the qualitative aspects of subjective experience in the first person ontology cannot be quantitatively measured in the context of the third person ontology relating to the science of physics. Or expressed more simply, statements about qualitative characteristics cannot be verified by quantitative measurements. Such quantitative measurements are the basis of the science of physics, they are what makes physics a science, rather than a philosophy among other philosophies.
This means one cannot make a scientific statement about the correlation extending to the 'personal' look of a color, only to which color is selected. Such a correlation is not impossible, but insisting on this assumption would go in the direction of closed dogmatic belief systems, which I'm sure is not what you want. Scientifically, I'd say, there is no other option than to leave this question open. (Which has interesting implications in itself.) Otherwise, there would be a conflict with the statement "'What blue looks like to you or me' cannot be described mathematically", since that is the statement from which this conclusion is derived. So, I guess, I'm saving us both from contradicting ourselves.
There is more to say, for example regarding the comparison of our understanding of electrical fields vs. our understanding of seeing-in-color, but I'll leave that for future messages.
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Re: The extent of correlation
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"Or expressed more simply, statements about qualitative characteristics cannot be verified by quantitative measurements. "
I doubt that this is a restricting scientific term as they key pouint is control : there is no control over what a person as subjective viewer sees. Stick the eiffel tower in front of somebody and that's all they see, like it or not. Paint it red ( maybe even 'objectively' measured by a wavelength measurement of the light coming of the paint ) and everybody stood in front of a red eiffel twoer will see a red eiffel tower, whether they like it or not. You are assuming that it is impossible to define an objecticve set of crtiteria for establishing a test of subjective qualities, and this is not a justified restriction.
Assuming that most people's sbjective experiences are the sane , or very similar, is justified by our own experiences. When peoople don't react or describe the same things we do, we notice it. So we can assume that most people see green pretty much the same way , in much the same way that we can assume holding a lighted candle to their backsides will hurt them. The only way we can object to this assumption ( and ALL science must make some assumptions at some point ) is if we know in detail about how brain processes work and how they produce wide and fundamentally differing experirnces in mentall healthy human beings - but we don't, and as we can only go on our experirnces, there is no reason to assume most people are pretty much the same.
No matter how you try Norbert you always seem to be mixing ontologies in a way that is simply not necessary. You always take subjective experirnce's first person qualities and decide arbitrarily that it can thus be excluded from third party investigation. Too restrictive and unnecessary ! We know that in addition to being a first person EXPERIENCE mental events are part of the universe and thus have a third person existence. Making some basic assumptions ( such as subjective reality between pretty much the same for most people, and the eiffel tower for me looking much like the eiffel tower for you ) we can thus incorporate them into a third party study.
We will then start the long process of gleaning the nature of subjective mentality from brains , in much the same way that phsyics gleans more of a picture of matter, but never, ever gaining what may be termed as 'understanding'
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Re: The extent of correlation
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Norbert, I'm no fary tale teller I assure you !
All knowledge is based upon faith to some extent. Is life a dream ? Ultimately I don't know because I can't prove otherwise. Is there an external world in which other people exist ? Are those people pretty much like me ? I think so, although again I can't prove it : it is possible I'm living in some huge dream. The entire basis of science has rested upon this belief as these for centuries : they are taken as read, but remain incapable of any logical proof. Science is based upon faith : its methods are more sophisticated than religion but its ability to provide understanding just as limited. We can say 'how the universe' but not 'why'.
One of the other big cornerstones of science is commonality : the idea we can take things that are simliar and analsye them as a collection.We construct a 'superclass' representation of the commonality and this forms the basis of our third party analysis. Atoms, gas clouds, planets, ants - we recognise objects in the world and group them by commonality and end up with the predicate. There is no reason why human mental experiences should not fall into the class of a collectable phenomena available for analysis in the time-honoured and very succesfull methods of science.
We know that the exprience itself cannot be measured : no problem, science rarely directly measured anything anyway. The radius of an atom is not measured with a ruler : it is measured by using equipment based upon a scattering theory of light combined with a theroty of atomic structure. Our 'atomic radius' is strictly speaking notional indeed, the product of centuries of investigation and theoretical work.
There is no reason to suppose that mentally subjective events , along with other directly unobservable events , such as atomic radii , won't succumb to the combination of investigation, experimentation and theoretical analysis that so far every other phenomena in the universe has succumbed to. It may take decades : it may take centuries : but that no progress could ever be made would be highly unlikely. And of course there are differences between people : but is it really reasonable to assume that my mental life is vastly different from my parents ? I look like like them and I'm contructed from pretty much the same stuff. My guess is we see the world pretty nmuch the same way - and I have absolutely no reason to believe otherwise , which is why I'm using this standard physical form of written language to communicate the contents of my subjective mentality to yours, and , I would suggest you are doing likewise. |
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Mathematics is an emergent property of consciousness
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Hi John,
> can you create natural phenonmena from mathematical objects ?
I'm actually suggesting that abstract re-presentations combine to create world views.
Mathematics is simply an abstract world view. Not real...just a map of reality.
So from this perspective, that's sort of a circular question. Also I'm not quite sure exactly what you mean by "natural phenomena"?
> How can 'systems' create subjective experiences such as 'the color red' ?
Clipped from http://members.aol.com/nonverbal3/primate.htm
Climbing cues. Visual learning is the hallmark of the primate brain. Foraging in trees (and using sight rather than scent) to find colorful fruits and berries went hand-in-hand with remembering where and what to pick. Unlike birds which fly directly to food spotted in trees, primates must chart a clever route through labyrinthine vines, limbs, and leaves. Mentally, they must navigate from point A to point B by decoding the branchways from many angles. (N.B.: In their 3D world, primates became skilled arboreal navigators. Today's monkeys, e.g., have sharp color vision, depth perception, and enhanced memory to recall the location of edibles scattered among forking branches and twisting vines.)
This is just one of the suggested steps our brains took in developing as the heart of our re-presentation based sensorimotor system. To be able to do this we would have to have developed the ability to build simulated re-presentations in our mind of the external world. Not just process the direct sensory input, but build actual simulations. Some people call these meta models.
So our perception of the "colour red" is received as input data, processed via our senses and delivered in an edited form to our brain. Our subjective experience of that is built based upon the complex neural networks that recognise patterns and build our internal re-presenations (self-reflexivity) based on our experiential history and current context.
Our selfplex (complex of symbolic replicators that inhabits our brain) then builds an internal narrative to enhance and justify this subjective experience.
Our brain also uses submodalities (the experiential qualities like size, location, shape, tempo etc) to encode meaning into our sensory based re-presentations. Most people when prompted can edit these submodalities which then generate changes the nature of their subjective experience. (I can point you to alot of information on this specific area if you want).
This then suggests to me that there is a strong causal link between these re-presentations and the emergent property we call subjective experience.
roBman |
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Like this debate, it's very epistatic...
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Hi John,
Since we're discussing the detail of perception I need to clarify what you mean by some terms...sorry if it appears pedantic...
> So if the experience of red is subjective
At a certain level of abstraction, but the initial sensory data received and generated by our sensory organs is probably "fairly" common across people. Where this line of similarity ends is what most of the cognitive people debating colour perception seem to me to be arguing about.
> and has no other conceivable content belonging to another subjective experience
Whoa...I didn't say that.
"conceivable content", well if it can be conceived then it's possible for more than one person to conceive it. That's the basis for memetics.
But whether today, trapped in our current world of mono-subjectivity, I can say that subjective content at a high level of abstraction in my reality is the same as in anyone elses is very questionable. Especially because alot of subjectivity is based on an individuals cognitive history.
> how would you derive such a purely semantic experience from a syntactical 'process' ?
By this I assume you mean how can I get "meaning" from a flow of perceptual steps. Is that correct?
If yes, then it seems to me that you are questioning my acceptance of "emergence" as the basis for this generation of "meaning".
I think that the process of generating subjective perceptions is highly epistatic (dependant on the syntax of these perceptual steps). And that this epistatic pattern varies from person to person (hence the difficulty).
So beyond a certain point, the way my mind stacks the sensory data and the self-reflexive meta models it builds about that creates my subjective experience. This pattern of stacking is unique to me because I built this as I grew up and received input and feedback from the world. Our stacking may start out similar out in our sensory organs, but as it moves deeper within "me" (my selfplex") it becomes more unique to me.
So like this debate, it's very epistatic. If I throw in a perspective that's too abstract before we've negotiated a common understanding of its basis it will change the outcome and therefore both our perceptions of what this debate meant.
This pattern of stacking is also constantly changing and if you slowly and imperceptibly change my sense organs (as in the growth of cataracts) then my subjective model will adapt and change too.
Also, you may have noticed that since the beginning of this thread I have jumped camp and become a dualist. It is a view of subjective reality as being encapsulated within a sensory based system that converted me. This is also based on emergence (there's a nice interactive essay on the topic at http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/emergence/).
Patterns only exist because we can integrate a set of sensory data into a single coherent metamodel we call a pattern. This pattern is not "real" in the sense that it is tangible and can be dropped on your toe. And often once we explore the mechanics behind the pattern we find it doesn't mechanically behave as it appears (e.g. the squares are really switching on an off and not moving). But to us, because of our ability to integrate sensory data using intelligent feedback loops, it appears very real.
I think these intelligent self-reflexive feedback loops are the key. The evolutionary forces of heredity, variation and selection that enabled life are one good example. The sensorimotor feedback loop that enabled autonomy is another. Subjective experience based on sensory data and symbolic replicators is another. And the quantitative empirical world view (see The Measure of Reality, Crosby, 1997) that has enabled the domination of Western imperialism and the rise of technology based socioculture is yet another.
I also think the growth of digital devices is helping us develop and extend our current sensory organs and the way we interact with the world which may create a new and uniquely powerful feedback loop. One that will again change our whole concept of reality.
roBman
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Re: Like this debate, it's very epistatic...
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I find your beliefs bizarre, roBman - but you are at least consistent !
It is in fact an inevitable consequence of believing that brains are abstract information processors as you do , to believeing that there has to be some 'extra' element in order to account for the nature of subjective reality and the sematical ( irreducible ) nature of color experiences and emotions.
Otherwise, how can you 'derive' the experience of the emotion of fear ? You can't generate fear with a computer program , e,g with a program 00101010011010101010. Or hate with a slightly different program 00101101010110101010. How would you know whether you were meant to be scared or angry ? You'd have to ask the programmer ! Emotions are irreducible and cannot be generated from mathematical objects such as computer programs. The notion is too ridiculous to contemplate, let alone argue about. The experience of colors is another example : how could the manipulation of digits be 'summed' to create 'experinece of red' - they don't even belong to the same ontologies, suggesting that emotions 'emerge' from 'system growth' is a bit like suggesting you can make apples out of oranges.
Leaving the only conclusion for strong AI enthusistasts to tak eyour logical step and also become dualists , the one phiolosophy strong AI was meant to avoid ! But I think dualism is unecessary, or at least of no use to us. |
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Re: Correlation (Re: Does consciousness make a difference?)
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Hello,
I'm sorry to barge in on your discussion but I was going to post a question that was very similar and you gentlemen are already well started down this line of thinking!
I was reading Ray's "Spiritual Machines" about 'the schools of thought' around consciousness. He claimed that one school, the 'mind as a machine', offered consciousness as a process reflecting upon itself but, though we understand that there are physical mechanics of vision and color for example, it still failed to explain 'the essence' of the experience, such as 'redness'.
But he did not explain what this failure was - it seemed to me it the real problem was a play on the words 'objective' and 'subjective'. Was it simply that he himself was unsatisfied with the physical definition of 'redness' as some people would find the physical definition of 'redness' quite satisfactory? Or, if I apply the 'process reflecting upon itself' mode to the issue, is dissatisfaction just a self-reflecting process reaching a recursive boundary without achieving its goal? Would this then make the self-reflective process, or its output, "subjective"?
I didn't see this thinking in your thread and am sorry if you have already covered it but I'm interested in your thinking.
Cheers, GBTH |
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