A robot prepared for self-awareness

the point is that i think the only things one can objectively use to discriminate a conscious process is non-computability.

One thing I'm afraid I've never quite grasped in these discussions is why people think non-computability should have anything to do with consciousness.
 
[quote="VektorBundle, post: 65116, member: 291"

at least by what physics looks like now. our physics is probably incomplete. and we can at 1st consider less ambitious goals than describing it entirely (including qualia, etc). any lens- or filter-like model is still obliged to quantify the interface rules (obviously there are rules) and explain the binding problem, etc. i suspect that something very important will be understood at the quantum scale. it may not necessarily be some variant of penrose's quantum gravity microtubule ideas, but i say that just because that is the most important area in physics where we have a glaring gap. all the unitary machinery of quantum mechanics is self-contained and self-consistently evolves forever without a collapse ever taking place. which is a discontinuous non-unitary and totally ad-hoc process imposed by hand to compute what we need. it is totally divorced from the rest of the theory. so something fundamental is probably missing...[/quote]

I think qualia are probably central to thinking and consciousness. There are qualia associated with every step in solving an equation, for example.

There are lots of rather complicated ideas about how consciousness interacts with matter (Stapp etc.), but it seems to me that the simplest assumption would be that wave function collapses can be biassed by conscious will (i.e. that that standard probability calculation for how things will turn out only applies in the absence of some sort of 'mental force'). Dean Radin did an experimenter in which mediators were able to shift interference fringes in a 2-slit experiment to a certain extent. However, this could (I think) have been no different from regular PK.

What do you make of the papers contained in links here?

http://physics.esotec.org/

David
 
What do you make of the papers contained in links here?

http://physics.esotec.org/

David

unremarkable, to put it diplomatically. it's not esoteric physics because it's not physics. i am not sure about esoteric because i didn't read enough. they look like essays for a high school class written by someone with a level of understanding of theoretical physics obtained from watching some 'strings, branes and cosmology' sort of program for the layman on cable TV. nice pictures though.
 

Thanks. Apparently those authors prove that a particular model of consciousness, with specific technical assumptions, requires non-computability. I can't judge how reasonable it is to impose those assumptions. But in any case, that paper was published only last year, and is developing a model published in 2008. People have been speculating about the role of non-computability for much longer than that, haven't they?
 
unremarkable, to put it diplomatically. it's not esoteric physics because it's not physics. i am not sure about esoteric because i didn't read enough. they look like essays for a high school class written by someone with a level of understanding of theoretical physics obtained from watching some 'strings, branes and cosmology' sort of program for the layman on cable TV. nice pictures though.

Well taking this article:

http://vixra.org/pdf/1312.0208v5.pdf

I'd hardly call it 'unremarkable' but it may well be junk. My understanding does not extend to string theory (I also note that Peter Woit and others are saying String Theory is a dead end), so I found it hard to judge, but the central problem seemed to be (as we discussed earlier) that he seems to end up saying that consciousness comes out of a particular set of equations.

David
 
Well taking this article:

http://vixra.org/pdf/1312.0208v5.pdf

I'd hardly call it 'unremarkable' but it may well be junk. My understanding does not extend to string theory (I also note that Peter Woit and others are saying String Theory is a dead end), so I found it hard to judge, but the central problem seemed to be (as we discussed earlier) that he seems to end up saying that consciousness comes out of a particular set of equations.

David
"consciousness comes out of a particular set of equations"
Isn't this a supreme example of getting the cart before the horse?
 
But the main revelation with this concern is the duality physical body/spirit: obviously consciousness is not seated in the brain...

One can then imagine that the informations relating to consciousness are stocked in the central memory of the cosmic computer and not in space. The astral vision would be an immediate perception in a gigantic data-base for space-time, somewhat in the manner in which one can visualize a picture in a 3D informatic program: there is no need for physical eyes but the data treatment is direct in informatic memory.
 
"consciousness comes out of a particular set of equations"
Isn't this a supreme example of getting the cart before the horse?
I'm not sure what you mean - my view is that no explanation of consciousness that reduces to a set of equations is going to work!

David
 
I wrote a piece about Artificial Consciousness that may be relevant to this thread. I hope you guys find it useful. Cheers, B.
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2015/04/cognitive-short-circuit-of-artificial-consciousness.html

Hey Bernardo,

Are you saying in your article that consciousness is something that only interacts with things we recognize as metabolic lifeforms? If so, what is the special thing that gives our physical brains/bodies the gift of this interaction that is missing in inanimate matter?
 
Are you saying in your article that consciousness is something that only interacts with things we recognize as metabolic lifeforms? If so, what is the special thing that gives our physical brains/bodies the gift of this interaction that is missing in inanimate matter?

I'm not postulating dualism. I am saying precisely that everything is just excitations of consciousness (monism). Some of these excitations are not dissociative (i.e. correspond to inanimate objects and phenomena), others are. A body is simply what a dissociative process -- an alter -- in mind-at-large looks like. For there to be 'interactions' there has to be consciousness and something other than consciousness (the two things that interact). I am precisely denying that there is anything at all outside consciousness, so there cannot be interactions of the kind you suggest. There is nothing 'special' in bodies that give them any 'gift of interaction.' A body is simply what a particular alter in mind-at-large looks like from the point of view of another alter. The empirical, inanimate world around us is what non-dissociative processes outside our personal alter -- i.e. in the broader mind-at-large -- look like from the point of view of the alter. More here:
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2015/04/the-reality-nervous-system.html
And here:
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/07/ripples-and-whirlpools.html
 
I'm not postulating dualism. I am saying precisely that everything is just excitations of consciousness (monism). Some of these excitations are not dissociative (i.e. correspond to inanimate objects and phenomena), others are. A body is simply what a dissociative process -- an alter -- in mind-at-large looks like. For there to be 'interactions' there has to be consciousness and something other than consciousness (the two things that interact). I am precisely denying that there is anything at all outside consciousness, so there cannot be interactions of the kind you suggest. There is nothing 'special' in bodies that give them any 'gift of interaction.' A body is simply what a particular alter in mind-at-large looks like from the point of view of another alter. The empirical, inanimate world around us is what non-dissociative processes outside our personal alter -- i.e. in the broader mind-at-large -- look like from the point of view of the alter. More here:
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2015/04/the-reality-nervous-system.html
And here:
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/07/ripples-and-whirlpools.html

Thanks for the response and the links.
 
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