[FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Sat Apr 27 14:35:36 EDT 2019

No.  But people who are under light anesthesia such as during a colonoscopy
sometimes talk.  I don't think they remember that.

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:32 PM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> Oh, yes.  We agree that I was unconscious.  And if you had been there, you
> would have experienced my unconsciousness.  But did I?  I think a person
> who adopts your position has to say, “No.”
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
> Wimberly
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 12:16 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
>
>
> Yes, you were unconscious.  As you know, I had that experience a few days
> ago.
>
>
>
> Frank
>
> -----------------------------------
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:13 PM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
> wrote:
>
> Hi Frank,
>
>
>
> The problem is that one has immediately to ask, what is the contrast class
> of experiencing consciousness?  Experiencing non-consciousness?  I think
> for your line of thinking, where consciousness is direct, that’s an
> oxymoron.  For my line of thinking, when I woke up from my surgery and 24
> hours had passed, I had a powerful experience of my non-consciousness.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
> Wimberly
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:33 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
>
>
> Jon,
>
>
>
> How about "experiences consciousness" in place of has consciousness.
>
>
>
> Frsnk
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 11:03 AM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Nick,
>
>
>
> I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.
>
> My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,
>
> though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.
>
> For instance, can something *have* consciousness? That said, a
>
> conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe
>
> with *consciousness language* begins with granting consciousness
>
> to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those
>
> that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new things
>
> with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).
>
> This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem
>
> of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.
>
>  `a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.
>
>
>
> You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which
>
> summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,
>
> I am going to extend Lee's comment and ask that we consider
>
> particular implementations or better particular embodiments.
>
>
>
> Hopefully said without too much hubris, given enough time and
>
> memory, I can compute anything that a Turing machine can compute.
>
> The games `Magic the Gathering` and `Mine Craft` are Turing
>
> complete. I would suspect that under some characterization, the
>
> Mississippi river is Turing complete. It would be a real challenge
>
> for me state what abstractions like `Mine Craft` experience, but
>
> sometimes I can speak to my own experience. Oscar Hammerstein
>
> mused about what Old Man River knows.
>
>
>
> Naively, it seems to me that some kind of information processing,
>
> though not sufficient, is necessary for experience and for a foundations
>
> for consciousness. Whether the information processor needs to be
>
> Turing complete is not immediately obvious to me, perhaps a finite-
>
> state machine will do. Still, I do not think that a complete description of
>
> consciousness (or whatever it means to experience) can exist without
>
> speaking to how it is that a thing comes to sense its world.
>
>
>
> For instance, in the heyday of analogue synthesizers,  musicians
>
> would slog these machines from city to city, altitude to altitude,
>
> desert to rain-forested coast and these machines would notoriously
>
> respond in kind. Their finicky capacitors would experience the
>
> change and changes in micro-farads would ensue. What does an
>
> analogue synthesizer know?
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jonathan Zingale
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20190427/05f8983e/attachment.html>