Re: third believe system Re: Does Searle's "Chinese Room" argument imply that consciousness is non-scientific?

Evgenij Barsukov <evgenij_b_hate_spam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:
Evgenij Barsukov <evgenij_b_no_spam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

3) However, human can NOT think about anything not directly related to
his body operation. For example human can not think about result of
two billiard balls colliding on the billiard table. Or, to make it
more obvious, he can not think of a explosion of a quasar in a distant
galaxy that can only be seen using a huge UV telescope rotating on
earth orbit. This entire process is completely outside of the context
of human body.
Human analyzing this process will have to _import_ the context
from outside of the "context sphere". This way he will be just
executing information processing using outside semantics (just like
any computer does) and that, according to above definition, does not
constitute thinking.

So where did human import the context from? In this case, he imports
it from "Humanity", which is an information storage/processing entity
that supersedes a single human in both space and time domains (as it
includes historical context for example). If we extend our "context
sphere" to entire humanity, we will get something that finally can
think about anything and everything (that is accessible to humanity
that is).

By "humanity", do you actually mean "the universe"? Otherwise, I don't
grasp what you are trying to say.

We have the power to think about anything our body and brain has a
causality link to - which is the entire universe.

First of all, even formaly, causal links can be established only
with object which distance does not exceed speed of light * your life
span.

No, not true at all. You got the idea right, but the facts wrong. Causal
links extend back in time to before our birth so our life spam has nothing
to do with it. We have causal links to the dinosaurs because things that
happened millions of years ago (they left a foot print in the mud) is
having a causal link on what we are thinking about today ("look Jack, a
foot print!").

The range of our casual link is limited based on the speed of light and the
distance back in time. We have no causal link to events that happened 1
year ago but which our 2 light years away from us. But in a year, the
causal link will be complete.

But much more practical, causal links to your body do not exist
from majority of objects even in your close vicinity,

Not true at all. Gravity creates a causal link between the activity of
very atom around us and every atom in our body with a time delay equal to
the speed of light. If someone on the other side of the earth drops a
rock, it creates an effect in us within something like 42 ms if my math is
correct. We have a direct causal link to the entire earth with a delay of
only 50 ms.

The fact that our brain doesn't have the resolution and sensors to detect
the rock dropping is not a fault of physics or a limit of the causal links
that exists. It's a fault of the sensitivity of the brain.

All those causal link effects simply fade into the background noise of our
sensor data.

just because they
never interacted with your body. So following above definition of
thinking (ability to create context) you can not "think" about it.

Just not true. We can think about it if we had better sensors. We can
create better sensors for ourselves by building scientific instruments to
map the causal link to something the size of sensors can react to. This is
why we use microscopes. It's not that the light data is not in our visual
field already when we look with our eyes, it's just that it's so weak, that
it fades into the background noise - our brain and our sensors just don't
have the resolution power to separate the data we want, from the rest of
the data we don't want.

You can process (compute) context created by somebody else who was in
contact with these objects.

True. But the the "somebody else" is not doing anything other than what
the microscope is doing. It's just helping to amplify the data to the
level which allows the resolution power of brain to see it.

It so happens the
universe is also filled with lots of other humans who help to link us
to other events in special ways, much like the telescope links us to
the distant galaxy. So an environment full of other intelligent agents
is like an environment full of highly specialized information
processing tools - which extends our powers just like the telescope
extends our power.

"Sphere of context" is not just a formal geometrical "sphere" with given
radius. Parts of this sphere have to be actually engaged into a common
computing using the same context definitions. This would exclude for
example extending the humanity context sphere to other planets with
intelligent beings, unless (!) a frequent common processing of the same
context occurs that would be frequent enough to call both civilization
a single thinking entity.
Presently such "joint computing" does not appear to exist, at least
I am not aware of any proofs of that.

My awareness is limited to the resolution power of my brain. The
resolution power of my brain starts with the fundamental system of encoding
the brain is using, which is pulse signals, but those pulse signals are
temporal, and can include a lot of information in the time domain. But a
neuron has limited ability to measure the temporal resolution of spikes. I
have no idea what the resolution power is, but it's limited by the neurons
ability to accurately differentiate temporal spacing over time. Temporal
noise (jitter) is added to the spikes as they move through the brain, which
means that any information about a rock dropping on the other side of the
world which was encoded in the original spike (maybe a temporal effect of
+- 10^-100 seconds, is lost in the noise added by the internal jitter added
to the spike by effects of the brain. That is, noise from the brain
itself, will bury most the data in the spike which comes from these causal
links to the rest of the world. It's this local noise floor which puts a
very real limit on the information which can be extracted and used by the
brain - which in turn, limits what we have available to us to "think
about".

Many things in our environment act as causal link amplifiers which allow us
to be ware of distant, or near, events that we always have a causal link
to, but which would normally be lost below our brain's noise floor. For
example, the Internet acts as a causal link amplifier which allows me to
sense things happening on your keyboard. Phones do it, telescopes do it,
all our sensors do it - they pick out specific aspects of the environment
and amplify their effects so that they are above the noise floor of our
brain's information processing system.

The brain forms a "sphere of context" which it uses to drive all our
behavior. It's internal state is created by events happening in the
environment. If you map that internal brain state - the state which is far
enough above the noise floor to cause a differentiation in our behavior -
you find it makes to an odd "sphere of context" in our environment. When
we are talking on the phone, our sphere of context expands to include
vibrating air effects near the microphone of the other phone because the
phone system has linked our sphere of context to that part of the universe.

But this sphere of context is also linked with causal links back in time
more than the 10 ms delay the phone is creating. If the person in that
phone call tells us about what happened to them 20 years ago, we or sphere
of context will suddenly extend back in time 20 years. We will suddenly be
aware of events that happened 20 years ago. If the person is telling us
about the dinosaur foot prints he saw 20 years ago, we are also linked back
in time with a causal connection to events which happened millions of years
ago. Our sphere of context momentarily extends back millions of years
because those events which happened 100 million years ago formed a causal
connection through time to our brain which created behavior differentiation
which was above our brain's noise floor. We were able to think about the
event which happened millions of years before because we had a causal
connection to that event which was strong enough for it to create effects
in our brain which were above the brain's information processing noise
floor.

But the humans (humanity) is not what defines, or limits, my reach. I
would still be able to think about the stars even if there were no
other humans on the planet.

You have no limits in processing imported context, but it is not
"thinking" according to above definition.

I'm not sure which definition of thinking you are talking about, but
"imported context" is all we do think about. It's all important using
causal links to the environment.

You can not however _create_
context outside of actual (!) and not "possible" contacts affecting
your body.

I don't understand what you are saying there.

I believe the brain in it's information processing role is creating an
internal representation of the environment using brain states, just like a
digital camera creates a representation of the environment when it creates
a picture. But our brain doesn't use static contexts like pictures. It's a
dynamic and constantly changing context which attempts to mimic what is
happening in the environment - at least the parts of the environment it is
able to mirror.

Just like the camera has a limited resolution due to it's limited ability
to represent state (5 million pixels of state for example), the brain's
ability to create unique state which it can respond to is limited as well.
This state the brain represents internally is the context which it uses to
generate all its behavior. It's a mirror of some very limited parts of the
state of the environment, with causal links extending back in time to the
events that created that state.

The brain creates it's own context. Though much of the brain state is a
mirror of what's happening outside the brain (that is what allows us to be
"be aware" of what is going on around us), the brain also generates it's
own state (our private thoughts and memories). So in that sense, the brain
very much does create it's own context.

The brain can't directly effect the context of the environment just by its'
action of information processing (what it thinks about), but it does of
course, change the context by it's effect on the environment (how we move
in the environment and the things we change in the environment). If we
move to a different room, we have changed our context, both outside the
body, and in the brain's representation of our context.

Speaking in terms of experimental data, to create context you can
not use any extrapolation or interpolation, but only actual hard data
measured by your own personal sensors or state of yourself (e.g. of
the whatever apparatus that does thinking).

Again, that makes no sense to me. All our context is created by a process
of extrapolation. We only understand that our current context contains a
dog, because of the extrapolation done by the brain on the raw sensory
data.

If we perform an average function on raw scientific data collected in an
environment, we have created new context which was not in the the data.
The average was not part of the data, but something we extrapolated from
the data. But yet, this extrapolated information (the average) is as much
valid scientific data as the raw data is.

To give an example, when you see a movie of a rolling red ball
and at some point it fills all the screen you just see a whole red
screen, you will say "I see a ball" when asked what it is.
However, your hard data is only "red pixels" taken by corresponding
bulbs in your eye. You can be wrong about your extrapolation. It might
be a clowns *** who moved there between the frames that you see, and
not a ball. "Ball" is result of your data processing, and in this case,
a _wrong_ result.

True. But it doesnt have to be seen as a wrong result. Only if you believe
it's a truth about the environment is it wrong. Otherwise, it's just the
output of a pattern recognition device using the video as input data. It's
a truth that the brain has classified the red pixes as being "ball" and not
as "clown ***". So in that respect, it's a truth. What might actually be
happening in the environment however is simply unknown.

The other truth is that we know from past experience, that the brain's
pattern classification system is right more than it's wrong. So we know
that when it comes time for us to produce behavior based on the output of
the brain's pattern classification system, it's always wiser for us to
produce behavior using the brain's prediction, than to ignore the brain's
prediction. It's better for us to act as if it is a ball, than to act as
if it's a clown ***.

And that of course is exactly what the brain does - it acts in response to
what it has decided it "sees" in the data.

Regards,
Evgenij

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