Re: A request for information please.


"Curt Welch" <curt@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:20070530022421.164$2K@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Stephen Harris <cyberguard-1048@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:

I think the major problem is the use of anthropomorphic terms.

If you hit your finger with a hammer then you feel pain and
most of us call this an experience.

If you a nail with a hammer then you can't tell if the nail
has an experience or not. It is better to describe this
situation as a causal event and not impute the meaning of
experience to it which has a specialized meaning.

Let's suppose that nails don't experience but that fingers
relay information that the brains interprets as the experience
of pain. There is probably some type of machine that can
correlate brain activity with the time of the finger hurt.
That could be construed as a test, especially if other humans
show the same brain activity (same location) when their finger
gets whacked by a hammer.

But there is never going to be an experience for the nail.
There is never going to be a test for the nail which will
establish experience, there is never going to be a test for
the nail feeling pain, if indeed, it never does.

What will happen, is that we will understand completely what happens when
a
human hits is finger with hammer. Once we understand what is happening in
the human, then we will be able to explain, in physical terms, what we
mean
by "pain", and "experience".

This statement of mine assumes the physicalist stance, and assumes that
we,
as humans, have the type of brain needed to understand what is happening
in
the body when we get hit by hammer. I however, don't have any problem
assuming either of these.

In addition, I believe I already understand it well enough to know exactly
what people are actually talking about when they talk about human
experience or human experience of pain. Meaning, I know exactly what the
important physical effects are that we call "experience pain", or just
"experience".

The stance you seem to be taking, is that this is just unknown - that
nobody has a clue what human experience is all about (what causes it or
what physical properties of the brain might be responsible for us being
able to experience or to feel pain). If this is true (and it was true 100
years ago), then we only get into trouble if we make assumptions about
nails feeling pain before we have figured out why humans feel pain and
what
physical effects we are talking about when we talk about humans feeling
pain. But we have known for at least 50 years what "feeling pain" is all
about. Skinner for one explained it long ago.

So the problem now, is why don't more people understand what has been
known
and published for 50 years? And why should we continue to act as if it
were not known - as if we turned the hands of our knowledge back 100
years?

Let's take a slightly different example. When a person says
he sees something it is connected to the brain and is a part
of what is claimed for human experience. But a camera can
capture the same information. That doesn't mean the camera
is seeing or having an experience. There is more to it when
a human says he sees something than your general level of
description: receiving visual information. You cannot assume
that because you find a way to group this into one general
category that the properties of the categorical level= 'what
it means for a human to see something' are carried up to the
more general level which subsumes the human eye experience
and the camera capturing of visual information under the
same description: obtaining visual data from the environment.

Except that we do know it's the same thing. The only problem is that
there
seems to be a lot of people who are not willing to accept what has been
known for 50 years. When you say there is "more to it" when a human sees
something, what more is there? How is it different? Can you specify the
physical difference and explain how they are significant enough to justify
the position that the camera is not having an experience? (or maybe better
to justify that a robot with a good visual system is not having an
experience because a camera is a very limited type of visual reaction
device).

Your assumption with the wording that if a robot sees and a
human sees, then they are both having an experience, therefore
a test which would detect human experience would necessarily
mean there is a robot experience test, or that the same test
would apply for both the human and the robot is a category error.

Both our made out of the exact same parts - electrons, protons and
neutrons. Both respond to the exact same basic forces of the universe.
Both have light sensors which translate light levels and locations in to
parallel signals. Both have signal processors which react to the signals.
Both then send the result of the signal processing to the effectors to
make
the machine react with the environment in response to the light.

How could it possibly be a category error to talk about these machines
with
the same words when they are clearly in the same category?

Clearly they are not! One is alive and the other is dead. That is a
*least* one basis for forming a class hierarchy that has the robot in one
class and humans in another. Having experience is another basis for them
being of different classes. So is complexity. So is substrate.


Granted, nails don't have much in common with machines that have light
sensors and can do complex signal processing of parallel signal paths, but
robots have a *** load in common with humans in regards to what type of
machine they are in the areas of how we respond to our environment.

Not really.


There is another thing involved here that might apply. According
to Norvig, strong AI thinks consciousness is an emergent property.

I really think that's just more crazy talk.

You are the crazy one (or at least grossly misinformed and naive).

That comes from people who
don't know what consciousness is,

You do not know what it is and all your hand waving that it is what certain
other machines posesss is unproven, un-sunstantiated bull***.

and it assumes that our current machines
aren't conscious, but that one day, when we build just the right type of
machine, it will be conscious. This type of confusion comes not from a
failure to understand the machines, but instead, from a failure to
understand humans. That is, a failure to understand what we are talking
about when we use all these special words we reserve for describing human
consciousness.

The words have meanings that you simply dismiss.


There is weak emergence and strong emergence. The latter type
is not something which is predictable for a physical system, and
not all systems exhibit emergence. Those systems with strong
emergence are not predictable. So you don't know if your robot
system when it gets complex enough will have an emergent process
which organizes awareness, or creates an ego, or has experience,
some other term if you don't like consciousness or mind; I mean
the part of you which has felt hammer to finger pain and thinks
of itself as Curt when it types posts.

This gives me the excuse to throw in something I think is relevant in
here.

Before I came to this group and started to have all these debates about
consciousness, I never gave any of this much thought. But what I found,
when I was forced to think about it, is that I had a self image which I
think is what most (many?) people see themselves as. I had a self image
of
being a disconnected "thing" that existed somewhere inside my body. I had
a self image of having a mind which was separate from my brain. I had a
self image of being a mind inside a body. But then I realized all that
crap was just silly confusion. I wasn't inside my body, I was a body. I
didn't have a mind which was separate from the brain, I just had a brain.

Yet Hofstadter and others say its the symbols Thoughts) that have a
causative effect on brain. Thoughts do "matter".


And after many months of learning to think correctly about what I was, my
self image changed. I now just see myself as being a body - a machine
which is interacting with the environment exactly like my robots interact
with their environment.

Not even close to being "exactly" like...


Now that I fixed my self image, I can't even
really remember what it was like before.

You have forgotten crap, but it was crap from the beginning - a
pseudo-dualistic stance. But reecognizing that, you still have come to the
wrong conclusions abot the differences between our current
computers/machines and humans/animals.


What I believe however, is that most people have my old distorted self
image where they see themselves as being separate from the body - as if
they were a soul disconnected, yet somehow tied, to the body.

Nope. You just fail to recognize that it is complexisy and substrate that
give rise to emergent phenomena such as consciousness/self-consciouness.


When they talk about consciousness, they are in fact trying to understand
where this disconnected feeling comes from, and whey a brain, which seems
to be nothing other than signal processor

Nothing other than? What happend to :

- memory machine
- RL machine
- categorization machine
- language machine
- perceptual machine
and on and on!

You are so focused on your own delusions you eliminate 90% of what
brain/mind/consciousness is.



, created this disconnected
"thing" called the mind.

What these people don't grasp, is that this self image they are trying to
explain, is nothing that is required. It's something they were taught,
and
which they now believe is a permanent part of being human which is not
something they can remove just by deciding to think of themselves
differently. It's something that is created by some complex physical
process which will just "emerge" in the robots once we get the right
complex physical process implanted in the robots.

But instead, it's nothing like that. It's just learned behavior. It's
just the way you were taught to think about yourself. It's a way people
tend to think about themselves if they don't have an answer to where these
private behaviors (thoughts) are coming from or what they "are". But once
you understand that the private behaviors you can sense happening in your
head is just the buzzing of your brain (like the operation of a computer
in
the head of a robot) and you think of yourself this way long enough, the
old view will vanish from your behavior set. You will see yourself as
nothing more than a robot with a advanced reaction machine which is
trained
by reinforcement creating your behavior. There will be no "soul" or
"mind"
left to explain. There is only a brain.

Yet thoughts exist and they form a mind adn they have causative effects in
the Universe.


So, when you wrote:

I mean
the part of you which has felt hammer to finger pain and thinks
of itself as Curt when it types posts.

There is no "part of me" which I think of as Curt. Curt is a human body.
Curt is a biological robot.

Says nothing. Or is an erroneous tautaology.

It's the whole thing and there is no part of
me inside, or created by, this body which is "Curt". There is no part of
me which "feels pain" which I call "Curt". I simply, as a whole, react to
the things like having my thumb smashed by a hammer. There are parts of
my
brain which detect the things we know of as pain, and other parts of my
brain which produce the reactions to these special stimulus conditions.
But "Curt" is no just one part of the brain, it's the whole body - exactly
like I would think of a robot I called Curt which had wheels and sensors
and a CPU for the brain which created the behaviors of the robot. The
whole thing is "Curt to Robot" and the Robot, when correctly educated,
would not have a false sense of being a soul in the machine - it would
correctly see itself as a robot made of the parts it is made of.

Perhaps you consider these
notions as illusions rather than experiences,

No, it's not an illusion. But what I see a hammer hit it as is simply
what
a hammer it is - a physical event which causes a string of other physical
events in my body.

But, what people see themselves as - when they see themselves as being
some
type of "soul" (aka mind) created by the body - that's the illusion.

But not as set of beliefs desires feelings thoghts and so forth. That is
not an illusion. Whether one cares to *attach* oneself to those
entities/processes is another thing entirely.


but you can't get
further than offering that as an assumption, not provable in the
sense to make us disbelieve we have experience by listening to
a poster who claims he does not accept presumption of his personal
experience of existence.

I've never tried to convince people they didn't have experience. What I
try to convince them of is that their experience is nothing more than the
physical reaction of their body to the physical event.

You don't even know what "physical event" means! In terms of what -
probability distributions? Atoms? Cells? orans/susb-systems? All of the
above in some man-made hierarchy with lots of inter-level communications?
All of the above?


If you don't see
your own experience that way, you don't see it correctly. If your
position
is that our experience isn't simply physical (you have to describe it as
an
emergent property to justify why it feels separate from the physical
body),
them my argument is that you have simply been brainwashed to believe
something that is not true.

Yes - you have been brainwashed to believe what you believe.


And if you care to, you can experiment on
yourself, and brainwash yourself into believing what I believe - that my
experience is just the physical action of my body.

But that explains nothing! The devil is in the details of how physical
(whatever that is) action and thought are related. How brainwashing can
occur.


Whether you want to believe that is not the important point. The point
that is more important is that we can change how we see ourselves, just by
thinking about it. If you can erase all the old evidence that makes you
believe consciousness is something created by the body, instead of just
being the behavior of the body,

What is the difference between C being created by the body (which it is!!)
and C being the behavior of the body (which it is!!)

Tells you nothing about how to get C into a robot.




then you have to ask yourself if the old
view was real, or just something you were taught to believe?

So that is a possible reason to consider
why there might not be a test of experience/consciousness for your
robot. But more fundamentally, the law of parsimony doesn't grant
by fiat that your robot/nail has experience just because humans
do, the burden of proof of this assumption rests upon you without
invoking categorical misrepresentations. As you know critics of
the Turing Test of behavior don't grant a mind/consciounessss or
experience to the machine/program that might pass such a test.

For the most part, people that don't agree with my position, haven't yet
figured out what consciousness is.

And neither have you! That is evident by your lack of depth
phi;losophically or practically in these discussions. Just lots of
hand-waving and wishing it were so.
..


They are forced to believe it's
separate, simply because they don't know what it is.

Separate from what? The body? I do not believe that. It is part and
parcel of how biological system are aware of their environment and
experience their environment. Using the body as an instrument.

And for the most
part, I suspect they all have this self image that makes them feel like
they have a mind which is separate from their brain.

Nope; emerges from the brain processes.

They have a self
image that makes them feel like there is a "self" which is feeling the
pain, which is somehow separate, and different from, their physical body.

Nope there too.

You seem to have a flase notion of what others believe. And then you rail
agaisnt that - but it is one big straw man!



They accept these feelings of being separate from their body as proof of
what this magical and hard to explain thing is called human consciousness.
But I bet none of them have even considered the possibility that the
feeling was something learned, and that it's something easily unlearned.
And once unlearned, and replaced with the view that we are nothing body a
body - all the hard to explain stuff stops being so hard to explain. We
don't need to explain how consciousness emerges as something separate
because there is nothing separate here that needs to be explained. We are
just a body which reacts to our environment.

If more people could work on fixing their self image, I think there would
be less confusion over what consciousness is.

Regards,
Stephen

An example of how I see your argument failing:

Entities are made of atoms.
Humans are entities.
Robots are entities.
Therefore robots have human properties
because they both are entities made of atoms.

Exactly my argument! :)

This example doesn't work because it generalizes
too broadly to support finer grained conclusions.

Which is why I went on to also show that robots have light sensors which
translate light levels into internal signals, and that they then process
those signals and end up producing as a complex function of the current
and
past sensory signals, the current output behavior. This facts gets us
into
a finer grained category which does in fact support my conclusions.

Nope - not even close.


You will also have to add various memory features and reinforcement
learning if you are going to explain how our behavior changes over time
and
to truly understand pain, but that's all the features you have to add to
understand we are now talking the same category of machine.

Nope; not the same category at all. One has experience of pain as hurtful.
How would a robot feel hurt in the same way as a human (that it is painful)?
Phenomenal experience my son! Not evident in the robot even if you say you
can program the robot to say "ouch" when I hit it with a hammer.



And, most important, which is something I hadn't thought about much until
this post, you probably have to fix your distorted self image before you
can understand how this is in fact all that is needed to put things in the
same category. Because if anyone sees themselves as some sort of soul, or
homunculus, or mind,

You conflate mind and soul - a category/logical_typing error!!

which is having the experience, instead of seeing
himself as a body which is having the experience of being hit by a hammer,
they will never understand that this complex feeling of being separate
they
are trying to understand is nothing more than a distorted self image which
they are not stuck with - it can easily be changed because it's nothing
more than a learned behavior which can be replaced with any behavior you
want it to be replaced with.

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



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