Re: Materialist Evolutionists

On 16 Apr, 05:20, j.wilki...@xxxxxxxxx (John Wilkins) wrote:
someone3 <glenn.spig...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 14 Apr, 04:40, j.wilki...@xxxxxxxxx (John Wilkins) wrote:
I apologise for the elay in replying. I've been doped up with pain
killers due to flu. Not optimal for responding to arguments.
...
Others have appropriately responded. But I will summarise thus:

1. If a cognitive system is complex and organised in the right way, then
it exhibits complex behaviour, including representation of its own
states. Call that "E" for experience.

2. Whether the system has E or not, all its states are sufficient to
explain its behaviours given the environmental stimuli

3. If the system has E, then it has to represent E internally. This must
therefore affect its behaviour.

So, if our robot has state E, then, like all its states, that will both
play an explanatory role, *and* be explicable in terms of its nodal
states. Now, suppose we do not know if it has E, but we do know all its
internal nodal states. Have we fully accounted for its behaviour given
inputs? I would say yes.

If all more complex states can be constituted out of the nodal states
(for example, "driving a servomotor", or "observing a change of pattern
in the visual field"), then a description of all the nodal states must
necessarily include those complex states. But we need not *know* that it
does. It might not occur to us as external observers to even distinguish
those states as distinct things. Or we might simply not happen to notice
the correlation of parts of the system with those events.

Likewise, we might have accounted for all the facts by describing the
nodal states, and not identified that aspect of it that correlates with
E.

There is another possibility here, for human cognition, that might be
considered: we name E for ourselves for folk psychological reasons, but
when we go looking at the states and structures of the brain and body,
we find that E is in fact just a linguistic or cultural myth, and has no
reality.

This may sound silly, but most neurological research has decomposed what
happens in the brain in ways that do not map neatly into folk
psychology. States of emotion, for example, or intentions, and so on.
Ordinary concepts evolve because they match the moral and legal and
cultural needs of a speaker, not because they accurately map the way
things really are in the organism. It may be that Hume was right, and
there is no self, no experience, no qualia, just bundles of neural
events that get organised outside the individual.

Your point (1) doesn't really make sense. Cognition relates to
perception/experiencing, so to have a cognitive system would imply it
is already experiencing.

No it doesn't. There are cognitive systems - cvomputer programs, robot
learning systems and classifier systems and the like, that for some
decades have been reliably run now, and nobody wants to say they have
internal experiences.



Substituting the word cognitive for experiencing you would end up
with:

1. If an experiencing system is complex and organised in the right
way, then it exhibits complex behaviour, ncluding representation of
its own states. Call that "E" for experience.

Which would seem incorrect, as there would be no 'right way', as it
was by definition an experiencing system.

No it isn't. A cognitive system is simply a system that learns about the
world and represents it internally. It doesn't thereby have to represent
*all* the world, including itself. Given that you introduced neural
networks earlier in this discussion, you must be aware of this. A simple
classifier system can be formed from a *single* ANN.

The remainder of your response to this point is therefore otiose.



So it would seem that the word should have been dropped, and you could
have written:

1. If a system is complex and organised in the right way, then it
exhibits complex behaviour, including representation of its own
states. Call that "E" for experience.

That wouldn't be experiencing though. It is experiencing if it is
experiencing. You are simply talking about a behaviour, and regarding
its behaviour you said yourself:

---
One does not need to know if the system is "experiencing" to explain
its behaviour.
---

Therefore its behaviour can be explained with the assumption it
doesn't experience, therefore behaving no differently than you would
expect it to if it wasn't experiencing. There would seem to be no what
grounds to label a system which was behaving as you would expect it to
if it wasn't experiencing, and which you had no other knowledge of
whether it was experiencing (i.e. you didn't experience being a
similar system yourself) as by definition experiencing. To do so would
seem to imply no care for the truth.

No, explaining its behaviour in terms of its nodal properties does not
imply that it doesn't experience *if it does experience*. You seem to
have an "all-or-nothing" view here, either a system and all its parts
experience, or none of it does. But I am saying that experience is a
property of a suitably complex system, and so parts of that system,
which are not suitably complex, will not experience anything. Likewise
explaining an experiencing system in terms of its node properties and
connections doesn't mean the nodes experience anything.

Take two systems: S1 and S2. S2 experiences (has E) because it is one
node or connection above the E threshold. S1 doesn't, because it is one
node or connection below it. I explain S1 in terms of its nodes and
connections. Do I not explain S2 in terms of *its* nodes and
connections? What physical property does one extra node or connection
add here?

You cannot get what you want merely by definition. If I am right that
experience, or consciousness, or qualia, are just some suitable
elaborate information processing properties, then saying that they
aren't because it's definitional is no response at all.



You covered the issue of the system being explainable with the
assumption that it wasn't experiencing in your response when you said:

---
If all more complex states can be constituted out of the nodal states
(for example, "driving a servomotor", or "observing a change of
pattern in the visual field"), then a description of all the nodal
states must necessarily include those complex states. But we need not
*know* that it does.
---

There would be no way of *knowing* whether the robot was experiencing
or not.

So you say. I deny this. We know it has E when we know it has all the
complexity that having E requires. We may not know that, of course, for
various reasons, but if we do know it has and employs that complexity,
then we know it has E.

The reason is (and this is repetitive), it would always be
behaving as it would be expected to if it wasn't experiencing, this
would be shown by its behaviour being explainable with the assumption
that it wasn't experiencing (even if this assumption were wrong), as
"one does not need to know if the system is 'experiencing' to explain
its behaviour".

Why should it be that its behaviour will be expected to be different in
anything but quantity if it experiences? Suppose I say that speed is
just the additive property of local velocity. Does that mean that I
can't break the 100mph? But moving at 100mph is something quite
different in a pedestrian zone than moving at 10mph.

So while if hypothetically you were correct, and the
physical did cause experiencing to emerge, and you did hypothetically
have knowledge of what the universe was like in terms of how the
physical activity were experienced if at all, you would have a
description of whether it had a direct experience of the physical
activity such as experiencing in fluctuations of the colour green the
brightness dependent on the amount of nodes processing, or a click for
each node processing, or, even if working on encrypted data whether
the universe was such that what the physical activity *represented*
would be experienced once an certain complexity had been reached.

Draw breath. Make shorter sentences. Paragraphs. All these things allow
your interlocutor to respond.

Most of this seems to me a non sequitur, and I do not know how to reply.

The
latter representative experience would suggest that there were
universal laws relating to what physical activity represented, though
no one to know. So I agree that if the physical activity were
responsible for the experience, that it would be a description of it
to anyone that had the unattainable knowledge of what the universe
were like with regards to the experience of a robot, if any, would be
like.

Ditto here.



Do you agree that from your perspective only the physical activity
could be viewed as explaining the behaviour, not how the universe was
in regards to how that physical activity were experienced if at all,
though as said, the physical activity while conceptually could be
thought of as a description, it would be a description to nobody?

Perhaps you could ask that question in a way that I could see the
contrasts between which which I am being asked to decide. What has the
whole universe got to do with this?



Regarding your other suggestion:

---
There is another possibility here, for human cognition, that might be
considered: we name E for ourselves for folk psychological reasons,
but when we go looking at the states and structures of the brain and
body, we find that E is in fact just a linguistic or cultural myth,
and has no
reality.
---

This would seem to imply that we no more experience than a cup. Have I
understood you correctly? If so, could we come back to this denial
that we are actually experiencing colours, sounds etc later, and just
go through with one physicalist possibility at a time.

No, what I am suggesting here is that "experience" is a category that we
only *think* we know what it refers to, and that as science advances we
will be forced to abandon this unitary category in favour of empirically
supported categories, none of which will be as problematic for the
neurophysiological reductionist.

The usual reason why people like David Chalmers think there is a "hard
problem" in explaining consciousness is what I call the Qualia Mistake.
They assert, based on intuition, tradition, or verbal definition, that
there is a difference "in kind" between simple reactivity to the world
and consciousness, and they term this the "quale" (pl. qualia). I think
that this presumption, based as it is on classical philosophy and in
particular metaphysics that is simply not supportable in the modern era,
is false and unwarranted. There *are* no qualitative differences, just
differences of quantity. All classifications based on "quality" are
inventions of our social, mental and linguistic limitations.

Hence I deny the major premise of these dualistic arguments, and the
conclusion fails to follow.

Regarding the word cognition:

cog·ni·tion
1. the act or process of knowing; perception.
2. the product of such a process; something thus known, perceived,
etc.
3. knowledge.

cog·ni·tion
n.
The mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness,
perception, reasoning, and judgment.
That which comes to be known, as through perception, reasoning, or
intuition; knowledge.

There are more definitions of cognition at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cognition

They all apart from the last which refers to 'cognitive' where in turn
you see the definitions relate to perception, awareness, and
consciousness.

Though if you wish to use it in the sense of a mobile phone that
learns what the user is most often typing and attempts to autocomplete
for example, or an alarm system that learns the shape of the room it
is placed in, and detects movement, then that is fine, or a robot that
has a speech recognition system, a parser, and speech synthesis, that
can add to its model of the world, then that is fine, as long as it is
clear how you are using it, and that it is clear you are not using it
relating to perception, awareness, experiencing consciousness etc,
i.e. not the usual usage of cognition or cognitive.

I had said:
---
Therefore its behaviour can be explained with the assumption it
doesn't experience, therefore behaving no differently than you would
expect it to if it wasn't experiencing. There would seem to be no what
grounds to label a system which was behaving as you would expect it to
if it wasn't experiencing, and which you had no other knowledge of
whether it was experiencing (i.e. you didn't experience being a
similar system yourself) as by definition experiencing. To do so would
seem to imply no care for the truth.
---

To which you replied:
---
No, explaining its behaviour in terms of its nodal properties does not
imply that it doesn't experience *if it does experience*. You seem to
have an "all-or-nothing" view here, either a system and all its parts
experience, or none of it does. But I am saying that experience is a
property of a suitably complex system, and so parts of that system,
which are not suitably complex, will not experience anything. Likewise
explaining an experiencing system in terms of its node properties and
connections doesn't mean the nodes experience anything.

Take two systems: S1 and S2. S2 experiences (has E) because it is one
node or connection above the E threshold. S1 doesn't, because it is
one node or connection below it. I explain S1 in terms of its nodes
and connections. Do I not explain S2 in terms of *its* nodes and
connections? What physical property does one extra node or connection
add here?

You cannot get what you want merely by definition. If I am right that
experience, or consciousness, or qualia, are just some suitable
elaborate information processing properties, then saying that they
aren't because it's definitional is no response at all.
---

Your response does not relate to what I had said.

I never said 'explaining its behaviour in terms of its nodal
properties does not imply that it doesn't experience *if it does
experience*'. My point was that if it can be explained with the
assumption that it didn't experience, and you have no knowledge of
whether it is experiencing, then to define that as experiencing would
imply no care for the truth, as what if it wasn't experiencing? You
claim knowledge of if the system was experiencing when you say in
response to:

---
There would be no way of *knowing* whether the robot was experiencing
or not.
---

you replied:
---
So you say. I deny this. We know it has E when we know it has all the
complexity that having E requires. We may not know that, of course,
for
various reasons, but if we do know it has and employs that complexity,
then we know it has E.
---

How do you *know* that experiencing has to do with complexity or
whether it is linked to a certain type of physical activity for
example? How could you tell whether only organic carbon based systems
experience because of a particular physical activity that occurs
within them, and that this wouldn't be happening in a robot, and
therefore the robot wouldn't be experiencing? The truth is you don't.
You are making claims about what you know, when you have no knowledge
on the matter at all. You might have a theory about whether it is
experiencing or not, but unless you have no care for the truth, you
would see that it is unreasonable to define the system as experiencing
based on a theory, when the theory might be wrong. Otherwise people
could make a theory such as "if it is carbon based it experiences", or
"if it has > X molecules it experiences" etc. The point is whether it
experiences or not, should not be by definition defined in terms of
the theory, else while the theory can never be wrong, it would be
because the word 'experience' would simply stand for whether the
system met the criteria of the theory, e.g. if it is carbon based, or
had > X molecules, or had a certain complexity. We would no longer be
talking about whether it did actually experience or not, in the sense
that we do.

Those where rhetorical questions by the way, I don't expect you to
answer them, they are just making a point, though if you wish to
continue pretending you know what you don't, then I feel it is fair
for me to question how you came to your knowledge.

Assuming you can understand the point being made above, we can step
back, and I'll go through the reasoning more slowly for you as you
seem to have got lost, not understanding what was written initially,
and therefore not being able to follow what was being said after it.
So, back to basics, regarding your S1 and S2 systems, can the
behaviour of S2 be explained in the same terms as S1 (i.e. in terms of
its nodes and connections) ?


.

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