Is this levels of consciousness or is it levels of intelligence. Did the ancients have lesser experience in terms of the subjective. This is all that matters, but i expect intelligence or knowledge will lead to better subjective experiences in the future. Maybe immortality. Drugs can make you happy but have all kinds of nasty side effects.

I think you might have leaped straight over the link you cited.

Like most things, it probably isn't anything complex. Pain hurts.

You haven't succeeded yet.

I disagree that they have the evidence on their side.

Most of the stuff that we would like a computer (or a person) to do is capable of being accomplished by a computer. I have a feeling that there isn't much reason for us to develop a computer that says "ouch" AND feels pain. I have no idea how I would be able to tell if it were in pain if it did say "ouch."

I have proposed that if a computer lied to get out of work, that this would be good enough for me to treat it as equivalent to a human.

I disagree that this even makes sense. A mouse is (in the same way as I imagine that you are) conscious.

I think so.

We will be able to prove computers are conscious. It will happen the moment a computer surprises you with an original question that it finds intriguing as much as you do in that instant, the moment it gains your respect as a thinker and derives pleasure from learning this to be true, the moment it makes mistakes and experiences the surprise of their discovery, the moment it cares to correct them, the moment it asks about its own future and wishes to know it can endure the passage of time, the moment it will find pleasure in something nobody ever programmed it before. That moment it has become unpredictably interesting and operates with complex original purpose in mind. I dare you to deny it then what you see in other people.

That's possible only we won't be able to prove, it's just we'll come to accept....

It depends on who you ask, of course. On the other hand, all the philosophers I'm familiar with who consider there to be a hard problem of consciousness (Searle, Chalmers, Nagel, others?), to the extent that they are also naturalists and consider brain function beyond phenomenal experience to reduce to physical states, end up positing either some kind of property dualism or some kind of panpsychism. Either way, they end up doing what you consider to be putting a "walk" into lower level descriptions of the physical world. The only real difference is at what level of description they place the correlation between physical states and mental ones.

It seems to me that if you credit the intuition behind the "hard problem" of consciousness, it's not immediately nonsensical to think that proto-conscious phenomenal states could be associated with physical states much simpler than a fully functioning human brain.

Convergence seems to have been attained. Nice playing with you.

Of course. There aren't any arguments re: consciousness that are convincing other than the one that states that there aren't any particularly convincing arguments.

I can accept that if you we consider emergent properties to be property dualism.

I don't think that a molecule of H2O contains hurricaniness within it or that a wheel contains bicycleyness within it. Is that some sort of dualism to your thinking?

I don't completely disagree. A bucket of water certainly is made of water molecules. There seems something special about a hurricane that isn't included in any of its individual components though.

With each molecule being composed of two hydrogen atoms bonded to a single oxygen atom.
Do the molecules of a glass of water that occupies a certain volume in 3D space, actually occupy that volume when no one is looking or is 3 dimensions of space an illusion created by human consciousness. If everything in the universe is made of atoms does it make sense to say the universe is a certain size independent of consciousness. If this question seems silly fair enough, it's just something I've being thinking.

I mean we don't see a glass of water the way it is, it's a model created by the brain, so if it turns out our three dimensions of space is an illusion I wouldn't be surprised.

Right, but I think there's the possibility of confusing levels of description with the hard problem of consciousness.

No one believes there is a hard problem of hurricanes. The description of a hurricane is a description of large scale behavior of 10^huge-number particles, but the behavior itself causally reduces to the behavior of the sum of the individual particles. The description can't be reduced as a practical matter, but the existence of the phenomena can be.

If you believe that consciousness is the same, you don't believe in a hard problem of consciousness, but in reductionism. If you do believe in the hard problem, then you believe there are some irreducible and ineffable phenomenal states, and then things like property dualism (and epiphenomenalism is a kind of property dualism that tends to correlate the phenomenal states to very complex physical states. Orch OR correlates them to very low level states. Various kinds of non-reductive physicalism seem to correlate them to low level states as well, just without actually positing any specific biological basis as of yet. But I think non-reductive physicalism is the most popular form of property dualism

That's why I think Orch OR isn't as outlandish as you think. It's just a first attempt to describe from a biological side how something like non-reductive physicalism works. It may be wrong of course, it probably is somehow, but it's not nonsense.

I realize I just repeated myself a little but I hope the elaboration is semi-useful :P

Penrose makes a similar argument to Lucas. Penrose's argument goes along the lines of:
1) Statements about integers are true or false

2) Humans are sufficiently ingenious to prove such a statement true or false. This may take a while for harder problems such as Fermat's Last Theorem.

3) If you programme a bot to prove theorems, it will be bound by whatever axiom set you typed in initially. So Goodstein's would be unprovable for a Peano bot.

4) Therefore humans are doing something which a bot cannot. Penrose's guess is that this is due to large scale quantum coherence in the brain. This requires a theory of quantum gravity to work.

A lot of people object to many of the steps in this argument. Some people object to the idea that humans doing maths are not algorithmic. Biologists seem to object to the mechanism he suggests.

Scott Aaronsen takes the view that quantum computers cannot solve un-computable problems, but Penrose has human mathematicians doing exactly this.

I guess this is why Penrose says quantum gravity is needed - with current knowledge of quantum theory, quantum computers are potentially quicker but they do not extend the bounds of what is computable. With a theory of quantum gravity, the computable bound could be extended.

I personally think there may something to his argument. It's clear that humans and bots operate fundamentally differently - there are still things where humans are better than bots.

I thought the idea of Gödel theorem was that this was not true. That there are statements that can be proved neither true nor false. Still lets go with it for the moment.

This is complete speculations. For instance I am sure there are true statments who's proof has more steps than there are nano seconds in the lifetime of the universe. In fact I stongly suspect that that could be proved. Still lets assume no such silly resource issues.

But a human can't prove Goodsteins theorem using Peno's axioms either. You just told me so. So I see no difference between AI or human here.

Why can't you program an AI to use transfinite induction?

Huh!! Neither humans nor AIs can prove Goodsteins theorem using Peno's axioms. Both humans and AIs can assume Goodsteins theorem is true. Both can be programmed/taught to use transfinte induction. I see no difference between human or AI capacity here. I think this statement is just wrong.

It's probably best to leave my opinion of Penrose's guess to the imagination.

Still I expect if quantum gravity did not work there would be no brains, so Penrose is not completely incorrect.

Put me down for 1,2, and 4.

No S hit.

This seems a "God of the gaps" style argument. No one completely understands how the brain works yet, so I am free to invent a pseudo science to explain it. Completely bypassing the recognised empirically based route.

(1) is simply an instance of excluded middle (which some object to).

Godel says that there are true statements which cannot be proven, which appears to flat contradict (2).

Godel says there are true statements that cannot be proved within a given axiomatic system. Penrose's view is the process of maths research is inherently non-algorithmic, so we are not constrained to a particular set of axioms, and can adapt to the problem in hand.

A specific example is Wile's proof of Fermat. As written, this used Grothendiek universes and so required choice.

I believe it's possible to rejig the proof to use less heavy machinery, and frame it entirely within PA. However, when doing the actual work, Wiles implicitly assumed choice.

What is an example of anything that humans can list using a non-effective procedure?

Damn, my previous post missed the point. Sorry, river_tilt.

provability and truth are distinct within number theory, that's what Godel concludes. Not that statements can be in some third state. The Godel statement is true but unprovable within the system. it is no less true for being unprovable

Actually no. Gödel's theorem says that if an axiom system is complex enough to encode itself, for example the natural numbers, then there are well formed statements that can be neither proved true nor false within the axiomatic framework.

I think both river_tilt and myself agree on this, what we are bickering about is the difference between a formalist or platonic view of mathematics.

For instance is there a concept of truth in mathematics or logic that transcends the concept of provable?

Okay, let's bicker. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough. This is excluded middle:

Of course there is, and it's quite standard, but really it's sophisticated RGT.

This statement is false.

*sighs* Another platonist.

I take the view that truth and provable are synonymous, in the sense that a logical statement is true if and only if it is provable.

I agree, FWIW. Where did I day it wasn't?

So do I, FWIW. Where did I say otherwise?

Sorry, I was being oblique.

The way Gödel's proof goes is to encode the natural numbers within themselves. So statements have meanings on two levels. Gödel then constructs a statement in the language of natural numbers that has the meta meaning

Assuming the statement either true or false leads to a contradiction. So it is neither.


Just above.

Do mathematical objects have any form of existence outside of formalised logic? Does two exist? If so then it might seem reasonable to assume that mathematical propositions can be determined true from outside of the body of formal mathematics/logic. In which case 'true' and 'provable' are no longer synonymous.

If 'Truth transcends provability' then true and provable are no longer synonymous.

I meant that, just as a matter of fact, Platonism is rife in math. Almost all real numbers are non-computable, for example. But I never said it is a philosophy I personally subscribe to. My own views on excluded middle, Godel and such are expressed in more detail in this thread.

To be ultra-picky, you need more than just the natural numbers for Gödel to work. If you only have addition, everything is computable. Multiplication is needed to get the encoding to work.

My personal view is that true means provable for the standard model. However, any attempt to try to axiomise the standard model runs into Gödel statements.

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That possibility exists. That is, in fact, one of the issues with the theory. Figuring out how brain tissues work is important work in the same way as figuring out how heart tissues work. If we discovered that heart muscles operate in part on quantum mechanics, we'd not say that was evidence that other pumps aren't really pumping.

The other BIG issue would be that consciousness (awareness!!!) is not the same as being able to solve incomputable problems.

It isn't at all the first attempt to describe how neurons work!