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That depends on your definition of "alive". But we are not just talking about "alive". We are specifically talking about consciousness. And if conciousness in us is just the result of a biological machine - I can see no argument from you as to why consciousness from a non-biological machine would be any less real or valid.
As was already said on the thread - the recent Johnny Depp movie hit this nail on the head. When challenged on whether it can prove itself to be conscious the AI simply answered the human "Can you?"
I get it - your need to think there is a god _requires_ you to believe consciousness is something really special and unique and much more than we observe it to be - and you believe this despite having zero support for it except for the occasional vague reference to "dark matter" when talking about consciousness. But it does not make it into fact for you.
All you are saying then is that consciousness is complicated. No other meaning is coming out of this than that.
However I would always urge people to be careful using phrases like "_cannot_ be fully understood". That something is not understood now - only means - and only ever means - that we do not understand it now. This is massively different from declaring it _cannot_ be understood.
But the simply fact remains - we have much and many evidences showing consciousness wholly and totally linked to the brain. That the former is simply something the latter produces. We have no evidence right now - at all - of any type - showing any separation - disconnection - or anything similar between the two. So our resident "Mystic" here is simply talking about nothing.
As far as the robot's response 'can you
- a hologram could be programmed to reply the exact same.
- its a script in the movie itself, the script tenders consciousness to the robot in order to add drama, it's a play.
Last edited by Sophronius; 09-25-2014 at 10:25 AM..
To fully understand red, Mary needs to experience what it is like to see red for herself.
But you just said that the scenario didn't require her to fully understand red to have a complete working model of brain function, so there's no point in worrying about "fully understanding" in this scenario. Did you have another in mind?
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No one else can do the experiencing for her
Unless the experience can be transplanted from someone who had the subjective experience into her brain. Impossible? Who knows - we're just making up imaginary situations here anyway, why limit ourselves to ones which beg the dualist option?
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After Mary sees red for the first time in her life, you could ask her: "Do you see red now?" and she would say "Yes" - which indicates that she believes she is seeing red. Is Mary justified in having this belief? I would say yes. If she is looking at a red wall and she believes that she is seeing red, then she justifiably believes that she is seeing red.
Even if she isn't, for example through some sort of optical illusion? So knowledge here is feeling something you're not sure is an accurate representation of the reality of either brain function or the external world? And then if she becomes aware of the illusion and realizes she wasn't actually feeling experiencing red, that must be knowledge too, even though it requires her to know that she was both experiencing and not experiencing red simultaneously. Feeling two mutually contradictory things about the same event depending on other factors doesn't really point towards it being knowledge to me. The more you think about this "intuitively obvious knowledge" the less it seems like the rest of the stuff we use the word for.
So knowledge here is feeling something you're not sure is an accurate representation of the reality of either brain function or the external world? And then if she becomes aware of the illusion and realizes she wasn't actually feeling experiencing red, that must be knowledge too, even though it requires her to know that she was both experiencing and not experiencing red simultaneously.
My definition of knowledge as "justified belief" was shorthand for the more common definition: "Justified true belief." (aka JTB) The "true" in JTB generates the most controversy, and gets us into the annoying business of "knowing THAT we know" and figuring out how to confirm the ultimate truth of things, etc. Generally speaking, I don't think that absolute certainty is required for knowledge. But I don't think that any of this is relevant to the central point I was making, which is why I dropped the "true" and just went with justified belief for the purposes of the present discussion. But the question remains: What definition do you want to use, and can you use this definition to show that Mary doesn't gain any knowledge when she experiences red in first-person?
You are radically missing the point if you think that all I'm saying is that "consciousness is complicated."
Yet that is pretty much all I can find in your post. That it is complicated - coupled with a declaration that it "cannot" be understood - which you base on nothing. Perhaps it is less that I am "radically" missing the point rather than you "radically" thinking you are making one where you are not.
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Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
What I'm saying is that some properties of physical systems are indexical (specifically: what it is like to BE a particular system), and thus these properties can only be known insofar as you adopt the unique perspective of the system
And this is just a property of the system. This has nothing to do with what I was replying to - which was to our resident "mystic" and asking him why such a system - non biological - would have such properties and more or less - than our biological ones.
In the end - conciousness is just a property of a complex system - so why would it be any more or less real - and more or less valid - were that system to be machine rather than biological?
I am not seeing an answer to this in his posts and dodges - and I am not seeing an answer to it in your tangent about the perspective of that system of itself and its own experiences.
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Originally Posted by Sophronius
- a hologram could be programmed to reply the exact same.
Indeed it could - but that does not take away from the force of the question - or the reason for which I present it here. The point again is that if one makes a demand of an AI to prove itself to be conscious - one needs first to question whether one is capable of doing it oneself in the first place.
My definition of knowledge as "justified belief" was shorthand for the more common definition: "Justified true belief." (aka JTB) The "true" in JTB generates the most controversy, and gets us into the annoying business of "knowing THAT we know" and figuring out how to confirm the ultimate truth of things, etc. Generally speaking, I don't think that absolute certainty is required for knowledge. But I don't think that any of this is relevant to the central point I was making, which is why I dropped the "true" and just went with justified belief for the purposes of the present discussion.
I noticed you never decided which of the feelings in my scenario were knowledge. The first, mistaken one? The second contradictory one which was revised based on external data? Both at the same time?
But in any case, now that you've removed truth from the idea of knowledge you just have to explain how you call a feeling which you know isn't giving you an accurate representation of brain activity or external stimuli a justified belief.
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But the question remains: What definition do you want to use, and can you use this definition to show that Mary doesn't gain any knowledge when she experiences red in first-person?
Regardless of the definition, I have proposed a made up scenario where she does not, to answer your made up scenario where she does. She uses her omnipotent objective knowledge of brain function and reported mental states of others to craft a machine which implants the knowledge of the feeling of having an experience in her brain. There's no red in any part of the machine or her surroundings so she never experiences red but is still left with the knowledge of what it is like to experience it. Later on she sees red, and assuming we ignore everything we know about neuroscience she experiences the same thing and confirms nothing new was added to her knowledge *
Is this possible? Who knows, but the answer doesn't matter. If you get to make up impossible scenarios, the rest of us get to do the same.
* - except for the fact that she has an experience of red in a new situation compared to the one the machine might have implanted. But if we're assuming she can know everything physical about experiences of red - of which the minute details of her every future observation of the color is a part - she can use her stipulated fortune-telling skills to know which particular future encounters she'll have with red and implant the knowledge of the feelings that will come up each time. Heck, she knows everything so might as well implant feelings of all possible experiences of red just to be safe, even the mutually contradictory ones. Of course all of this virtual time travel through perfect knowledge is physically impossible, so it would be a mistake to apply any of the conclusions from this thought experiment to reality.
Yet that is pretty much all I can find in your post. That it is complicated - coupled with a declaration that it "cannot" be understood - which you base on nothing. Perhaps it is less that I am "radically" missing the point rather than you "radically" thinking you are making one where you are not.
This is my take as well. There's lots of appeals to Subjectivity[tm] as something special and fundamentally different from the rest of the natural world, but that is backed up with nothing but questions about our current lack of understanding. Seems to be a placeholder for a lack of knowledge, only using a specific word to pretend there's more than an argument from ignorance going on.
Someone said. If you can't tell the difference between a programmed hologram and a human, then they essentially the same thing. Is a severely retarded person alive? is it "aware"? Can something be "aware" and not alive? I think the progression from fetus to "old man" is a indication of the transition from not aware to aware. And maybe our robots will go through these in time.
Yet that is pretty much all I can find in your post. That it is complicated - coupled with a declaration that it "cannot" be understood - which you base on nothing.
I'll try again to make this clear: I don't recall ever saying that consciousness or qualia "cannot be understood." Just the opposite. I think what I have been consistently saying is that consciousness/qualia can, in principle, be modeled using the principles of self-organizing complex systems (based on the idea of a "qualitative chaos". So, in this sense, qualitative consciousness can be understood in terms of abstract principles. Furthermore, I've been consistently arguing that qualitative consciousness is the ONLY thing that can be understood directly and, thus, known with complete confidence. I can potentially be wrong about every aspect of the world, but I there is a logical limit to how wrong I can be about my qualitative conscious experience.
The point I've been emphasizing is that the qualitative aspects of consciousness cannot be COMPLETELY understood, based purely on the abstract (third-person/objective/mathematical) models of science. Mary cannot totally understand "what it's like to experience red" unless she, herself, has her own first-person experience of seeing red. I will grant that studying the details of other people's brain activity, etc., might possibly trigger a first-person experience for Mary - thus even though she has been blind since birth she might nevertheless have her own first-person experience of what it is like to experience red. (I doubt that this would happen, but I would not say it is impossible).
What Mary cannot do is study mathematical models - no matter how perfect the models might be - and thereby come to fully understand what it is like to see red in purely abstract/third-person terms. Just for comparison:
Mary can (in principle) study neuroscience and come to understand people's BEHAVIOR in purely abstract/third-person terms because all physical behavior - including human behavior and neural-firing patterns - is objectively knowable. She can study mathematics and fully understand a mathematical theorem in purely abstract terms because the principles of mathematics are essentially abstract, so it's not surprising that math can be understood abstractly. The "explanatory gap" occurs when you try to fully explain subjective qualitative experience in purely third-person/objective/abstract terms.
Most people comprehend this intuitively. They see that there is no deep problem with trying to explain math to a blind man, but very little reflection is required to see the deep problem with trying to explain what it is like to see red to a blind man. I respect the philosophical efforts to try to pursued us that somehow some future concepts might allow us to explain qualitative red in terms of an abstract/objective model, but so far I've seen nothing to convince me that this is logically possible. I know that our common-sense intuitions can often be wrong, but in this case I think the pre-philosophical intuition is exactly right: There is no third-person substitute for first-person experience. Most people intuitively understand Louis Armstrong when he says: "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." I think something along these lines is true of qualia in general. Math can take us a long ways toward understanding, but it can't take us all the way - unless, somehow, it can trigger first-person experience.
I think that some confusion occurs because certain philosophical shenanigans cause people to confuse models of reality, or neural representations of reality, with reality itself. Just a little scientific knowledge is all that is required to see that I don't experience a chair, as such, "directly" - what I directly experience is a mental/neurological model of a chair based on the way in which my brain categorizes concepts, sensory inputs, etc. I think it is fair to assume that a perfect mathematical model of every aspect of the chair can, in principle, tell me everything that can be objectively known about the chair. But my knowledge of my own mental/neurologicalmodel of the chair is different than my knowledge of the chair that is being modeled. I have direct/first-person knowledge of my own mental processes, but everyone else can only have indirect/third-person knowledge of my mental processes.
Indirect/objective knowledge always involves some degree of potential doubt (I can always question whether or not my representation of reality is an accurate representation of reality), whereas there are limits to the kinds of doubts I can have about my first-person/subjective experience. I can have doubts about what these qualitative experiences "really are" in objective terms, but I can't doubt that - whatever they "really" are - they SEEM LIKE "this" - where "this" refers to my own subjective experience. I can be wrong about the meaning of a pain, or the source of a pain, or the objective neurological nature of a pain, etc., but I can't be wrong about the fact that, at this moment, I feel THIS pain. If I believe that I'm experiencing pain, then I am experience pain, plain and simple. You can study a neurological model of my pain and always doubt whether or not I am really in pain because you can always doubt whether or not your model of my pain is a perfect model. I, on the other hand, can look at the objective model of my pain and know, with absolute confidence, that I am, in fact, experiencing pain. Indeed, I don't even need the model. I can know that I'm in pain without studying any model at all. If you think that you can know everything about my pain by studying a mathematical model of my pain, then you are confusing a "model of pain" with the reality of the feeling of pain.
To generalize this concept: If you think you can know everything about qualia by mathematically modeling qualia, then you are confusing objective models of qualia with the first-person reality of qualia.
I believe that we will eventually build conscious machines who have first-person qualitative experiences. With a good theory of consciousness, we can know with high confidence whether or not a particular machine is experiencing qualitative consciousness (e.g., is or is not really feeling pain when it acts like it is feeling pain). But I think it is just plain silly to think that mathematical models of consciousness tell us everything that is worth knowing about conscious experience. Indeed, the most important thing to know about conscious experience is the first-person qualitative nature that can't be known just by studying perfectly good third-person models. This is not an argument for the existence of God; it is simply an acknowledgement of the amazing brute-fact reality of subjective qualitative experience.
Furthermore, I've been consistently arguing that qualitative consciousness is the ONLY thing that can be understood directly and, thus, known with complete confidence.
Why do you think having a feeling isn't knowledge in any useful sense of the world. It tells us little about how the brain actually works - just having a feeling tells you nothing of how the brain processes your senses and turns them into experiences. It tells you nothing about external reality, as optical and other illusions show. What did you learn by having a feeling? It couldn't be what the feeling feels like, because that leads to an infinite loop of the feelings being what it is like when you have a feeling - which looks like english words in the correct order but leads us nowhere.
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The point I've been emphasizing is that the qualitative aspects of consciousness cannot be COMPLETELY understood, based purely on the abstract (third-person/objective/mathematical) models of science. Mary cannot totally understand "what it's like to experience red" unless she, herself, has her own first-person experience of seeing red.
False. It might be possible to implant false memories of experiencing red, for example. She would then understand what it is like to experience red without ever having had the first person experience of being exposed to red.
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There is no third-person substitute for first-person experience.[/b] Most people intuitively understand Louis Armstrong when he says: "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." I think something along these lines is true of qualia in general.
That's an awfully convenient way to make them whatever they need to be to continue rationalizing in a particular belief about them, but it doesn't do much to further our understanding of brain function.
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To generalize this concept: If you think you can know everything about qualia by mathematically modeling qualia, then you are confusing objective models of qualia with the first-person reality of qualia.
"The Tao that is the subject of discussion is not the true Tao"
Both seem to be statements of religious faith rather than anything testable about the real world.
I don't recall ever saying that consciousness or qualia "cannot be understood." Just the opposite.
I was referring to your words that "I've been pushing the idea that physical systems have properties that cannot be fully understood in purely objective terms". I was just pointing out that if there are properties we do not understand now - then that just means we do not understand them now. It does not mean they "cannot" be understood. We simply do not know that.
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Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
I think what I have been consistently saying is that consciousness/qualia can, in principle, be modeled using the principles of self-organizing complex systems
I think what I have been consistently saying is that if we do model it and create a system that is concious - that this systems consciousness would be no more or less real or valid than our own. The only difference would be that one was a biological machine - and the other not. Which is why I questions Mystic on his declaration that "The machine would not be alive and therefore would not have the property of "Being""
He failed to answer. As has everyone else.
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