[FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

[Frank Wimberly]

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
>
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