Re: Strong AI Thesis (No Chinese room, I promise)


"Allan C Cybulskie" <allan.c.cybulskie@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:bpf_f.264$fo1.50974@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Curt Welch" <curt@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:20060405234946.937$re@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Allan C Cybulski" <allan.c.cybulskie@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Kind of a problem here is that the NEURONS are making the fingers move
and type the messages. But WHY do the neurons produce that effect?
Because of how they've been set-up physically. To put this a better
way
and to really get it inside your philosophy: I do not post because I
want
to; I want to post because of a side effect of the neural firings that
are moving my fingers. I would make that post whether I wanted to or
not. So if you could shut off the conscious experience side of
posting,
I would make the same posts and be totally unaware of wanting to -- and
wanting to would be totally irrelevant.

In short, to hold the position you do you will have to change a lot of
how YOU talk about things, which will likely bring on a major shift in
your world view.

Sure. And that major shift has happened to me. But you don't have to
change how you talk. You just have to change your understanding of what
you are really mean.

The issue is that I have seen no evidence that you have done so. It seems
to me that you confuse yourself with the old terminology and that sticking
to it simply allows you to avoid the consequences of your own theory. For
example, as I have said it is pointless in your view to ask why we punish
someone. And yet you do, and act as if you actually do something in that
case when by your theory you don't.

Nonsense. One can be a determinist and argue that it is sometimes necessary
to control behavior via punishing responses. As to why people use
punishment, the answer is: "because eliminating the behavior in question is
a reinforcer." [That's the quick version].




Should we punish people for doing wrong, because of determinism?

Of course. Why do you think we punish people? Not because they
"deserve it". We do it because are trying to shape our future to be
a
better place for us. By punishing a person, you are shaping their
future behavior (assuming you are smart enough to punish them in a
useful way which is not always the case with society).

Um, now here is an example of the way your language has to change to
support your view. You ask "Why do you think we punish people?". The
answer from your view is "Because the neurons fired and led to the
'punishing' action." The "do they deserve it" or "shaping the future to
be a better place for us" ideas are PURELY CONSCIOUS. And in your view
that means that they are side effects of neural firings. Without them,
we would to the same thing. Your only way out of that conclusion is to
assign conscious behaviour to a different and specific set of neurons
and
to argue that the interaction between the "consciousness" neurons and
the
other neurons changes what we do (you've claimed something like this
before, but not at this level of neurons). But then the actions and
interactions of THOSE neurons are still in the deterministic chain.
You
have a perception event (finding out about the "crime") which fires off
into the "consciousness" neurons. Due to that structure, it produces a
conscious event and then the neurons fire back into the
"non-consciousness" neurons. But that's still totally deterministic
and
out of the control of the consciousness, since it only produces the
consciousness it does because of the state it's in. So it ends up
being
the same thing: we have a perception, neurons fire, as part of that
conscious experience occurs, and totally irrelevant to that experience
(it is just a side effect of the interface to that "module") we take an
action. So we still never punish people because we want to make the
world to be a better place for us as that is -- in your view -- just an
illusion.

That's right. Let me help you play this game.

When you ask why do we do something - such as punish people, you can
answer
the question from different levels of abstraction. The lowest level is
as
you say, we do everything because that's what the way our brain was
currently wired to work. So when you think about something you just did,
you can always know that the reason you did that at the lowest level was
simply because that is how we were wired. So everything I just wrote
happened because of how my brain was wired.

But at the next level, we can answer why our brain is wired like it is.
Since we have a learning brain who's construction is constantly being
changed based on experience we can say that we are wired this way because
the total sum of our all past experience since we were created has
adjusted
our brain to be built like it's currently built. So what I'm writing now
is all because of a life time of having my behavior shaped by experience.

These comments don't "help me play the game" at all. This is, in fact,
PRECISELY what I' m saying: that you don't punish someone because of a
"want", but that a "want" is produced by the same process that punishes
the
person. At best, it's mental post-rationalization ... which doesn't work
under your view, but seems to capture the idea nicely. The reason I
interrupt you here is that your segue into consciousness below does not
help
your position, but raises other ideas that need to be addressed so I
thought
I simply point this out here.


The actions of our brain is our conscious behavior. So, any talk about
turning our consciousness off is just absurd. If the brain is working
correctly, it's conscious. You can't separate our conscious self from
our
physical self. Which is an important problem with how you are talking.

Um, except that isn't what I said. I simply said that either the same
neurons that carry out the "punishment" produce the conscious experience,
or
conscious experience is a separate module of neurons to allow for the
"feedback" you talked about. But neither case helps you, since it still
implies that if neurons DIDN'T produce conscious experience you'd still do
what you did, regardless of whether or not that actually happens. And as
it
turns out, you are wrong that it doesn't happen: there are many actions I
take that I am not consciously aware of, and most conditioning produces
such
actions. The only way you can make this claim is to claim that being
physical means being conscious, but that will simply lead to an
equivocation
since that clearly ISN'T the sort of consciousness I'm talking about, even
if I accepted the extension. Which I don't.


All the decisions we make are deterministic. They were determined by a
long history of experience. But would it, from another perspective, be
odd
to think that we were making decisions not using your past experience?
Not
based on our hunches and feelings which have been formed by years of
experience?

Ah, this is the same mistake JG makes: I am not arguing that past
experience
and environment are IRRELEVANT. I am arguing that they are not
DETERMINATE.


Now, back to the intentional issues of doing something because we want
something - such as to make the world a better place. Our learning
hardware is built to calculate, using statistical techniques, which
behaviors are more likely to produce more rewards for us, and less
punishment (pain).

Actually, they aren't. The organization of the brain HAPPENS to duplicate
that behaviour and functionality, but clearly that isn't what it was
"built"
to do, as that sort of goal cannot be encoded into an evolutionary
framework.


So everything we do, is what the brain has calculated
(to the best of it's limited ability) is the action that will make the
world a better place for us.

Except, again, it doesn't, because the idea of "making the world a better
place for us" is a conscious idea or intention. The brain may ACT like
that's what it does, but it cannot want to do that because wants are
conscious or mental, and not evolutionary. You cannot import mentalism to
your physcial/behaviouristic framework to avoid the tricky issues.

So, that makes it valid to say that
everything we do is intended to make the world a better place for us
limited to our brains ability to correctly predict what behavior will in
fact make the world better for us.

Well, if you think you can ascribe intentions to a collection of neurons,
but I'm not convinced ...

However, the brain's algorithm's for
calculating "best" are very simplistic, algorithmic, and short sighted.
However, this dumb short-sighted algorithm, has allowed us to develop
complex language and thought behaviors that turn out to be very useful
behaviors to use. They end up allowing the system to make far better,
and
far more long term predictions about the future, and allow us to control
our actions today, based on what these language behaviors allow us to
predict today.

Except, of course, that isn't the case. WE don't control our actions any
more than we did in the past. It's simply the case that our neurons are
hooked up to each other differently and so produce different actions.
Maybe
certain areas take more inputs. But none of that is any different than
what
we did in the past. This is, of course, assuming your theory.


So at the next level of abstraction, we can understand the complexity of
what happens when we start to talk to ourselves about upcoming events. I
might say to myself, "gee, I've got to get up early tomorrow so I better
go
to bed now and not stay up later". But the "decision" to say that to
myself was all just a deterministic reaction created by my brain (myself)
based on years of experience in creating language behavior, and in
learning
to respond to language behavior. And the reason I said that to myself,
is
that past experience has shown that to be a good thing to say to myself,
under the current conditions.

No, no, no, no. The reason you "say that to yourself" is that the neurons
that kick in to get you to go to bed as a side effect trigger that
conscious
reaction of you saying "I've got to get up early tomorrow so I better go
to
bed now." You cannot claim that the saying of that in any way impacts
your
actions because that's simply the neurons firing and following their
uninterrupted course.


Actually, the point is that you are a deterministic machine DETERMINED
by
your history, not merely shaped by it. And what is a decision if
conscious experience is an illusion?

Have you ever written computer software? Have you have coded an IF
statement? That's what a deterministic decision is. The computer is
making decisions when it executes an IF statement even though it's
behavior
is deterministic.

This is kind of funny, actually, since I've been working writing computer
software for almost 10 years now. So yes, I've written a computer program
[grin].

Now, think about it in terms of a case statement, into which almost all IF
statements can be turned. Still think that's the same thing as deciding,
or
does it start to look like reacting to some sort of state and not a
decision
at all?

We do not, in
fact, EVER adjust our own behaviour

OF course we do. In many ways. For one, when we say something to
ourselves like in the example I gave above, where we said, "I should go
to
bed early", we have just adjusted our own behavior.

But as I said, we haven't, since under your neural view that is the result
of neuron firings that were triggered deterministically by something else
... and so it isn't THAT statement that adjusts your behaviour.





.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Jeff Hawkins Q&A
    ... >Although you shouldn't conclude that where the stimulus ... >starts is where the consciousness experience resides. ... There is no doubt that the brain is part of the consciousness ... between neurons and the fact they are performing ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: Evolutionary question concerning God.
    ... I realise that neurons firing is important, ... How can the connections effect how the neurons states are experienced, ... This wording still differentiates between "consciousness" and "a subset ... of brain activity" in an artificial and meaningless way. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: What does this have to do with electronics?
    ... and fields and communications channels among the neurons. ... There are patterns to the electrical signals in your brain. ... that still doesn't try to explain what this "consciousness" ... doesn't invalidate anything that you already know - it simply ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Evolutionary question concerning God.
    ... Matt Silberstein wrote: ... Deprive the brain of oxygen and you lose consciousness. ... our consciousness is a whole bunch of neurons over time. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Electromagnetic theory of consciousness
    ... I don't understand how consciousness could be a 'relationship'  -- ... So the neurons work through electrical stimulus (only one mechanism, ... In the brain the overall field effect of the electrical activity will ... To put it simply, we'd need to find a geometry, even if it is a very ...
    (uk.philosophy.humanism)
Loading