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The premise of the knowledge argument is not that Mary is "omniscient." Mary is a neuroscientist who has complete understanding of the best possible third-person theory of brain functioning.
So you're saying that the best conceivable theory of brain function won't be aware of a simple optical illusion that we've known about here in reality for over a century? Seems like you're going out of your way to exclude lots of knowledge in order to make the argument work.
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then I would leave open the possibility that somehow comprehending this theory triggers her own personal experience of red - at which point she would then understand the qualitative experience of red.
Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Lots of hypotheticals on top of hypotheticals here to work around the existence of a simple optical illusion.
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The key to understanding the point of the knowledge argument is to understand that all of Mary's knowledge about qualitative red is achieved via the study of third-person concepts.
Yep, including third person observations of people reporting their impressions of optical illusions.
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But whether this feeling really is an experience of qualitative red is another empirical question.
I thought you kept telling us that 1st person experiences are automatically knowledge. Now we have to justify them using outside sources?
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Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof The premise of the knowledge argument is not that Mary is "omniscient." Mary is a neuroscientist who has complete understanding of the best possible third-person theory of brain functioning.
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Originally Posted by KCfromNC
So you're saying that the best conceivable theory of brain function won't be aware of a simple optical illusion that we've known about here in reality for over a century?
I don't recall saying that, or saying anything that implies it.
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The key to understanding the point of the knowledge argument is to understand that all of Mary's knowledge about qualitative red is achieved via the study of third-person concepts.
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Yep, including third person observations of people reporting their impressions of optical illusions.
I agree.
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I thought you kept telling us that 1st person experiences are automatically knowledge. Now we have to justify them using outside sources?
I thought I just explained this, but I'll try again. If I am, in fact, suffering pain, then I automatically know that I am having "this" experience, where "this" is an indexical reference to the qualitative feeling. I don't need to be a language-user in order to have this feeling. Infants and animals can have qualitative experiences of pain. An infant won't know the word 'pain' and it won't have a concept of pain that ties into expectations based on cultural learning, but it is, nevertheless, having a qualitative experience that is real - the qualitative experience exists whether anyone other than the infant knows anything about the qualitative nature of the experience. The infant, however, knows about the experience in a way that no one else can know. For us to know that the infant is in pain, we need a theory of brain function and brain-scanning equipment in order to identify the third-person aspects of the infant's pain - namely, the neural correlates of the infant's pain. The infant, however, does not need any of this. The infant simply experiences the pain directly without any theoretical interpretation of brain scans.
I guess if you don't want to use the word "know" in such a ways as to say that the infant "knows" or has "first-hand acquaintance" with pain, then that's your right, but I don't see the point of it. I would agree that it is not "propositional" knowledge, but I don't see why direct acquaintance with qualitative pain isn't a type of knowledge - or, at least, the fundamental root of knowledge.
In any case, once I become a language-user, I can apply words and concepts incorrectly.
If you do think "artificial" intelligence can be constructed - then we are already in agreement and little more interaction is required. I am instead waiting to have mystic tell us why it can not be done other than shouting "But it is not alive!" as if this makes the point for him.
"To BE or not to BE" that is the question! What Gaylen is trying fruitlessly to explain is the difference between existing and BEING. If we ever solve the creation of a conscious machine . . . it will BE . . . and we will simultaneously have solved the Abiogenesis issue as well. I am thoroughly enjoying Gaylen's efforts and feeling somewhat vindicated in my own communication failures.
they hooked up "wire framed legs" to a person brain so they can walk. I am not sure what people don't understand about complexity and consciousness. Watch ants until you understand that your brain operated in almost the exact same way. And we will copy it. Thats what we do.
we can't know everything about the color red if we don't understand how animals experience it. Although your "mind" is based on "experience" it is not "knowledge" about red. of course it is a continuum to me. "red" meaning danger" or "stop" is knowledge. But that is more of knowledge about a society then it is about "red". Like all continuums start chopping off things that are clearly not "knowledge" with the understanding that within the limited knowledge we have there is a large "grey area". like: "red makes me happy". well if "red" makes me "sad", then the knowledge about red is that "color" can invoke a emotional response. Then responses becomes it own data set.
Last edited by Arach Angle; 10-21-2014 at 05:41 AM..
Reason: the usual
"To BE or not to BE" that is the question! What Gaylen is trying fruitlessly to explain
Well actually - the questions were in post number 33 but as usual for you - you simply ignored them - skipped past them - and replied to this post to someone else instead. The only thing "fruitless" therefore is asking anything of you - while expecting a straight answer.
I agree with Mordant but think the time will not take a hundred years. Right now Moore's law is still relatively true. Computers (hardware) roughly double in power every two years. Right now we are coming up on human limitations to software, because the code is so complex and the programs so huge we are using computers to aid in the software generation.
What happens when computers design other computers (hardware and software) then the evolution of AI will increase exponentially. Then self awareness will come quickly. If you saw Bladerunner (Phillip Dick's "Do Androids dream of electric sheep?")you realize that when AI's reach a certain degree of sophistication they might be indistinguishable from humans or even superior in many ways.
Asimov wrote extensively about this and he was concerned about the morality issues which he solved by programming in the three laws of Robotics It is troubling that most research in robotics is being done by the military. How do you avoid the Terminator scenario and keep robots so they are working for us and not deciding that our infestation of the planet is a bad thing?
Another question to ask is if/when we hear from other planets from other star systems will we be greeting the intelligent lifeforms or their intelligent self aware robots, since such a journey would probably take thousands of years?
I agree with Mordant but think the time will not take a hundred years. Right now Moore's law is still relatively true. Computers (hardware) roughly double in power every two years. Right now we are coming up on human limitations to software, because the code is so complex and the programs so huge we are using computers to aid in the software generation.
Moore's law is an observation about complementary trends: the increase in computing power and the decrease in the cost of that computing power over the same period. It tells us that raw digital computing performance and memory capacity are rising and are exponentially getting cheaper, but it says basically zero about how effectively that raw capability is being harnessed. My assessment (from the front lines of software development, incidentally) that it is not imminent but will take a few more generations likely, is based on all that compute power being dressed up with nowhere to go.
We still have the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) in Windows, and when I upgraded to OS/X Yosemite the other day, the upgrade still lost my control panel setting to show the audio volume control in the menu bar -- a one bit error which I (and my wife, who did the same upgrade and lost the same nondefault setting) had to fix manually. As long as we see computers so completely bungling simple things like this, I think we can lack confidence to be uploading our consciousness into them or doing anything equally exotic. Or expecting them to do anything equally exotic on their own.
That said, your point that there can be an exponential tipping point, does make these things devilishly hard to predict, which is why it's not too soon for AI theorists to be thinking about checks and balances, lest some singularity-like event suddenly overtake us, making artificial intelligence our last invention. Indeed, there are a couple of good and fairly approachable books out on this topic, and smart people like Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, who is forward thinking enough to embrace things like asteroid mining and is certainly no Luddite, nevertheless openly and nakedly fears the possible implications of AI.
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Originally Posted by Altruistic1
Another question to ask is if/when we hear from other planets from other star systems will we be greeting the intelligent lifeforms or their intelligent self aware robots, since such a journey would probably take thousands of years?
It is one possibility, but then we are assuming that all sentient life (1) has life spans approximately like our own, (2) doesn't have a hive mind that weighs long term multigenerational goals very differently from us with our relative value on individuality and (3) hasn't achieved biological immortality, which is a concept only a few of us are even beginning to think possible and desirable, such is our failure of imagination. We are also assuming other things projected from our own rather primitive status, such as that other civilizations are still hampered by diverting so much of their energy and creativity into shared illusions like theism.
Of course at the same time we're flattering ourselves that a civilization that advanced and different would even find us interesting -- or even notice us if it encounters us. Remember how the earth was condemned to demolition to make way for a hyperspace bypass in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Remember how the aliens said it's too late to complain now, the permits were on file at the regional field office at Alpha Centauri for a couple hundred years and THAT was the time to complain? This may be the funny / not funny end of humanity for all we know.
This is one of the strangest ideas I have heard atheists state. That human consciousness is no different than something which could evolve into being inside a man-made machine or computer.
Do some really believe that a machine can have conscious feelings?
In theory? Yes.
However, it is unlikely that we will ever reach that state with computer science and programing as it exists today.
Keep in mind that emotion, intelligence, and consciousness are all different things. Like we could develop a machine that is able to recognize patterns that are incomprehensible to humans or able to learn at an amazing rate. That doesn't mean it is aware it exists nor does it mean that it has any sense of self-preservation (aside what is directly programmed into it), that doesn't mean it values machines more than people or consciously values anything.
We are also far from developing a machine with true intelligence (never mind emotion or consciousness). And if we ever do start developing machines with self-awareness and emotions it will be a gradual process and we will be able to develop the ethics and knowledge associated with machines that are self-aware and have some form of emotion.
I am not an expert on computer programing or computer science, but from what I do know, we are very unlikely to accidentally build Skynet out of the blue.
Yes, exactly. The sum total of what you can say using this "knowledge" is that "I have a feeling". A feeling of what? Can't tell for sure without external justification.
Obviously I've had a great deal of difficulty explaining and/or justifying my dual-aspect approach to the "explanatory gap" and my embodied/enactive/"self-organizing qualia" view of the nature of consciousness. I think that, to be truly conscious, a machine needs to have qualitative experiences - "feelings" - but what are these feelings above and beyond the physical behaviors of physical entities (neurons, electronic circuits, etc.)? By taking a "dual aspect" approach, I'm trying to say that mental states basically ARE physical states (essentially accepting a sort of mind/brain identity physicalism), but I'm claiming that our standard concept of "physical" needs to be re-conceptualized in a way that acknowledges the subjective/qualitative aspects of some physical systems. I think I've been vague, however, about what I mean by re-conceptualizing the notion of "physical." So let me try this:
In very broad terms, I think that some concepts require (or logically imply) duality (e.g., opposites, or complimentary aspects, or a spectrum of more fundamental concepts, etc.). The basic idea is that you can't even state the meaning of some terms without logically implying an understanding of some opposite or complimentary concepts. I want to suggest that "mental" and "physical" or "physical"/"non-physical" are like this. I'm not saying that the meaning of "physical" logically implies the existence of "mental" or "non-physical" entities, but I think it does imply "dual aspects" that are implicit in our concept of "physical." I think that part of the problem of making sense of "qualia" stems from the implicit nature of "mental properties" in our efforts to discuss physical properties. In other words, to employ the concept of "qualia" is, essentially, to try to put into words what it is that is logically implied in our notion of a "physical" world. Linguistically, this is incredibly difficult (as, I think, my discussion with KC have shown). But I think I can suggest a way to get a grip on this problem.
I've been advocating the idea that qualitative consciousness experiences are "mind/brain/world" processes (not just "neural processes"). I'd like to now cash out this "mind/brain/world" notion in terms of certain logical presuppositions for using the term 'physical.' Our concept of 'physical' logically pre-supposes agents acting in the world in terms of qualitative feelings (motivations, desires, values..."affordances"...). Our ability to conceive of a physical entity is based on the potentials for our interactions with it. Our ability to conceive of the entities proposed by physics implies a pre-commitment to a very complex ontology of what Heidegger called "being-in-the-world." There is simply no way to focus on the "physical" (or "third-person") aspects of an object without already conceiving of a larger context of agents acting in a world. My point is that the third-person/objective aspects of reality are only some of the aspects of being-in-the-world. In this light, it makes sense (to me, at least) that we cannot expect to reduce ALL aspect of being-in-the-world to just what can be captured in mathematical models (or in terms of objective/measurable entities). In other words, "being-in-the-world" implies aspects of knowledge that cannot be fully captured in terms of object-knowledge because all knowledge of objects always already presupposes a more holistic knowledge of qualitative feelings, values, goals, desires, etc.
Again, I'm not claiming that this means that "non-physical things" exist; I'm saying that our concepts of physical entities (insofar as 'physical' refers to objective/measurable) always already implies qualitative/subjective experience as a necessary compliment to the quantitative/objective aspects of experience. Descartes noticed that he could doubt the existence of "external" objects (conceived of in objective/quantitative terms), but he could not doubt the existence of the "internal" (subjective/qualitative) aspects of his own experience. From this he concluded ontological dualism, whereas I'm only concluding that there are logically-implied dual aspects of agency - the agent can focus on internal (intra-agent) aspects of experience, but only by "objectifying" these feelings (treating them as-if, in some sense, external) - but this ability to "objectify" always already implies the subject/object dual-aspect of experience.
The bottom line is that it makes no sense to say that the qualitative aspects of experience are completely reducible to (or fully explainable in terms of) third-person entities (e.g., the particles and forces hypothesized by physics). A quale is a physical processes (roughly like "mind/brain identity theory" would suggest), but being a physical process does not mean just being that which can be objectively measured or modeled. Being a physical process is always already to-be-embedded in a world that included subjective/qualitative aspects that are primordially pair-bonded (so to speak), with objective/quantitative aspects.
The bottom line is that it makes no sense to say that the qualitative aspects of experience are completely reducible to (or fully explainable in terms of) third-person entities (e.g., the particles and forces hypothesized by physics).
Meanwhile cognitive science and neuroscience moves forward, undeterred by the philosophers telling them that what they're doing is "logically" impossible.
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