<div dir="auto">Jon,<div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">How about "experiences consciousness" in place of has consciousness.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Frsnk</div><div dir="auto"><br><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature" dir="auto">-----------------------------------<br>Frank Wimberly<br><br>My memoir:<br><a href="https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly">https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly</a><br><br>My scientific publications:<br><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2">https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2</a><br><br>Phone (505) 670-9918</div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 11:03 AM Jon Zingale <<a href="mailto:jonzingale@gmail.com">jonzingale@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Nick,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">For instance, can something <i>have</i> consciousness? That said, a</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">with <i>consciousness language</i> begins with granting consciousness</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new things</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"> `a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">I am going to extend Lee's comment and ask that we consider</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">particular implementations or better particular embodiments.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Hopefully said without too much hubris, given enough time and</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">memory, I can compute anything that a Turing machine can compute.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">The games `Magic the Gathering` and `Mine Craft` are Turing</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">complete. I would suspect that under some characterization, the</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Mississippi river is Turing complete. It would be a real challenge</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">for me state what abstractions like `Mine Craft` experience, but</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">sometimes I can speak to my own experience. Oscar Hammerstein</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">mused about what Old Man River knows.<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Naively, it seems to me that some kind of information processing,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">though not sufficient, is necessary for experience and for a foundations</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">for consciousness. Whether the information processor needs to be</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Turing complete is not immediately obvious to me, perhaps a finite-</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">state machine will do. Still, I do not think that a complete description of</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">consciousness (or whatever it means to experience) can exist without</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">speaking to how it is that a thing comes to sense its world.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">For instance, in the heyday of analogue synthesizers,  musicians</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">would slog these machines from city to city, altitude to altitude,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">desert to rain-forested coast and these machines would notoriously</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">respond in kind. Their finicky capacitors would experience the</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">change and changes in micro-farads would ensue. What does an</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">analogue synthesizer know?</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Cheers,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Jonathan Zingale</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div></div></div>
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