Re: type writers and tooth aches II

"grayden" <gsolman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Curt Welch wrote:

> But you are forgetting that that whole interpretation is a result of
> your experiential set.

I don't believe I'm forgetting that. Though I'm not exactly sure what you
think an "experiential set" is.

> There is no justifiable reason to assume any
> hierarchical precedence of 'reality'.

I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to make reference to there.

But at the atomic level, all interaction is linked into causal chains
(atoms pushing their neighbors around, which in turn push their neighbors
around) which create a hierarchy of interaction which leads to the
"virtual" ideas at the higher level I was talking about. It's not just two
levels, it's millions and millions of levels however in this complex and
long causal link of motion in the universe.

> Your brain 'locked inside' your
> skull, isn't really locked inside anything. The neurons themselves may
> happen to be encased in bone, but their functioning is explicitly
> reliant on a continuous chain of dependencies. They rely on blood flow,
> nutrition, a body to interface them with the environment, sensory input
> to interpret. All of these elements are logically and physically
> enmeshed. If you try to define a physical boundary between 'you' and
> the environment 'out there', you'll find that nothing you come up with
> is complete.

It's not hard to do at all.

It's the signal processing that creates our consciousness. Even though the
correct functioning of a neuron depends on the rest of the body (and the
environment) doing it's job, the neurons don't fire in response to blood
flow. They fire in response to other neurons firing. By tracing this
causal flow of information (the signal processing), we can identify
multiple loops which I believe is the essence of what creates human
consciousness and what defines the boundaries between "us" and "out there".
There is no single hard boundary, there are multiple loops, but along with
the complexity of the loops comes the complex ideas of self which humans
have.

Everything inside the loop is what creates the "us", and everything outside
the loop is the "out there".

Most important however is not just the loops, but the causal links of the
learning system that is constantly adjusting the signal processing
hardware. That is, what causes us pain, and pleasure, is what is important
to us because those things are what the learning hardware uses to shape the
behavior of our neurons - to shape our very consciousness.

I see the keyboard as not part of myself only because I don't have any pain
sensors wired to the keyboard connected to my learning hardware. If we
were to connect the keyboard to my pain sensors, such that whenever someone
was to press a key, it would cause me pain - as if someone were sticking a
needle in my arm - the keyboard would quickly become part of "me". I would
learn to carry it around and protect it just like it was another hand.

When people loose pain feeling in a limb, it quickly becomes not a part of
"them". People that loose feeling in an arm have been known to use it like
a hammer and ignore the fact that they are doing damage to their arm
because they no longer see it as part of themselves. It's no longer "their
arm", it's just a hunk of meat hanging off of their body.

So our primary "body" image is created not by the fact that our body parts
are all glued together, but by the fact that the external boundary is
defined by pain sensors which are used by the learning hardware in our
brain to adjust our behavior. When you move that pain sensor boundary, our
sense of self moves with it.

A secondary sense of self is created by what we are able to control with
out brain. I can't make the keyboard move just by thinking about it, but I
can make my fingers move. But the boundary of what we can make move is
easily extended beyond our body. If I pick up a stick, I can use it to
make things move which I can't reach with my arms and hands. I can for
example drive a car respond to my thoughts by driving it. We don't see the
car as being a part of ourselves mostly because we have no pain sensors
connected to the car. But we do learn to make it respond to our thoughts
just as automatically as we make our fingers respond to our thoughts - so
it becomes a part of us in yet another way.

Yet another sense of our conscious boundary (I won't go so far as to call
it part of ourselves), is what we can sense - that is, what we can feel,
what we can see, hear, and smell. The limits of our sensory connection to
the environment forms yet another concept of the boundary of our
consciousness.

> You, the environment, and the boundary are all
> manifestations of the same environment. So to say that there is
> something 'out there' and something else that is somehow less real 'in
> here' is largely unjustified.

Yes, if you ignore the importance of the signal processing, and the
learning hardware that adjusts it, there seems to be no place to draw a
line. The body and the rest of the environment are one large dynamic
system. The neurons depend on energy which comes from the environment so
the entire environment, out to the Sun and beyond, are all part of what
makes us what we are. So, if you look at this you might wonder why our
"consciousness" is limited to only our body? You might wonder why the
whole universe doesn't create one large conscious "being" instead of lots
of individual beings.

The easy answer is that it does. i.e., everything in the universe has some
degree of consciousness and our consciousness is all linked together.
Human consciousness however is different because of the complex way we
interact with our local environment. The complex causal loops created by
the structure of our body and brain creates a dense concentration of data
flow though our brain and though our local environment. If you were to try
and draw these loops, you would end up with a diagram that looks something
like the magnetic flux lines which surround and pass through a magnet with
a very dense concentration in the brain, and decreasing concentrations as
you get further out into the environment.

My consciousness extends out into my office because as I move my head, the
view of all the walls around me changes. I'm consciously aware of how the
light coming from my office changes as I move - or as something moves my
walls.

I have no current conscious awareness of what is happening in the next room
because the causal loops don't currently connect me to the objects in the
next room. My "conscious flux" lines don't extend into the next room at
the moment. Or more accurately, the connection is so weak as to be "off my
radar".

This disconnect from the next room happens because the causal links of
neurons are discrete/digital - they either fire or don't fire. It's not a
continuous/analog causal connection. Signals too weak to make the neuron
fire are ignored so they can't flow through these loops.

What we "experience" in our consciousness is this entire set of
conscious-flux lines surrounding us. And these flux lines are created by
the causal features of the brain, and the body in how it's connected to the
environment and how it forms these local loops.

Any machine that can create the same type of causal flux lines with its
local environment should have a similar type of consciousness in my view.

A rock has a causal link to its local environment, so I think it's
conscious as well. But where it has 1 path through the loop, we have 100
billion paths. That's what makes our causal loops create a type of
consciousness not found in rocks.

And the fact that each human body creates it's own set of closed loops, is
why each human seems to be an independent consciousness.

When we interact with another humans, we create larger loops that pass
through both of us. The better "connected" we make our causal loops, the
closer we become to being one consciousness instead of two. However, our
ability to connect our loops is limited by the bandwidth of our sensory
channels and by our ability to link our sensory channels.

> The relation of consciousness to its
> instantiating substrate can only be analyzed by that same
> consciousness,

I don't really grasp what you are getting out there. Humans have no
problem analyzing each other. I don't think I grasp what you mean by
"analyze" if you think only a person can analyze themselves. Humans also
have no problem analyzing pigeons.

> which means the knowledge of the substrate being
> analyzed is limited by the perceptual efficacy of the consciousness it
> generates. It's a problem akin to Godel's incompleteness. There's a
> hole in the system that can be easily patched from a more encompassing
> point of view, but this larger system in turn has its own hole.

Yes. But not all self referencing systems need be incomplete or have
"holes".

Have you have tried to write a computer program, that when you run it, it
prints out a copy of its own source code? This is yet another example of
self reference that can seem at first to be impossible.

If you write program X, it's easy to write another program, Y, which when
run produces the source code for X as its output. But program Y is larger
than program X. So how can a program print a copy of itself since it can't
be larger than itself? It can be done in just about any programming
language.

I think we can understand how we work because the knowledge required to
understand how we work is far less than the total knowledge we can hold in
our signal processing system. Understanding how we work, is easy -
understanding everything about ourselves is impossible. There's no way I
can predict what I will do next, but I can know enough to build a machine
that is conscious in the same way I'm conscious. At least I believe this
will turn out to be true.

> That we
> don't experience everything doesn't imply that what we do experience
> isn't real.

What we experience is "real" by the very definition of the word. But what
we experience is (by the fact of how the universe works) always the shadows
on the cave wall and never the objects creating the shadows.

If billiard ball A, hits B, which hits C, C only "experiences" B directly,
but that experience was caused by A so C has a causal link to A.

A -> B -> C

C has "knowledge" of A indirectly through the actions of B. B is nothing
but a shadow of the actions of A. This happens at the atomic level in our
universe. Atoms move mostly in response to their neighbors, but all that
motion is shadows of the motion of other neighbors. It's impossible for
the action of any single atom to have a direct causal link to all other
atoms in this universe so all our "knowledge" must be "second hand".
That's if "knowledge" is ultimately nothing but the motion of matter (which
I believe it is).

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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