81 replies to this topic

[RighteousReason]

Do brain states=mind states?

...as opposed to what??

[jaydfox]

Hank, are you trying to pull our legs, or are you honestly asking these questions?

[RighteousReason]

Are you a complete idiot or are you really not answering them?

[sfty]

[DJS]

3. I am not trying to prove something about qualia (attn: Don). The language of qualia suggests quality of experience. Experience can have quality with or without sentience. It is simply a matter of how different minds differently process similar data. I do see an strong intimacy between mental processing of sensory data and sentience, but I do not think the idea of qualia properly captures this.

I am still puzzled then, Cliff, as to what exactly you have in mind with your conception of sentience. I imagined that sentience meant something along the lines of intrinsic, ineffable, phenomenal experience. Operating on this assumption, qualia would be a legitimate perceptual example.

Back to intuitions.

My intuition is that a given wavelength of light must be represented as something. Hence, my intuition tells me that a philosophical zombie is simply not possible. With that said, why a perceptual element is represented in the way that it is is completely a mystery to me.

The same goes for thoughts, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc...

[DJS]

mystery

And remember Chomsky's distinction for a mystery:

A problem is something where we have a general idea as to what the solution will entail.

A mystery is something where we don't even know how to ask the question.

Hopefully, as a radically augmented intelligence, I would be able to come up with better questions.

[DJS]

Experience simply is.

(That's the best answer I can come up with for now. )

[Clifford Greenblatt]

hankconn said:

Are animals sentient? If not, then are you saying that humans are the only things that have sentience and humans are the only things that have intelligence (in terms of your definition of each)?

I am making no claims in this thread as to whether animals are or are not sentient. We may feel that some animals are sentient, on the basis of affection and other emotions that appear similar to ours, but we lack the means to prove whether sentience is present in them. I do see clear evidence of some intelligence in animals. This intelligence may be much less advanced than ours, but they do show ability to solve some problems. Does a new born baby have the survival skills of a year-old dog? All the baby knows how to do is drink and cry. However, I am convinced (but do not ask me to prove) that a newborn baby is very much sentient.

hankconn said:

What is the un-mentioned context with which you mean "oblivion"?

Oblivion is a major issue for the immortality institute. The party line is death=oblivion. I claim that loss of intelligence does not equal oblivion, but loss of sentience does equal oblivion, even if no intelligence is lost.

hankconn said:

Are you sure that sentience isn't so fundamental to intelligence that "intelligence for the sake of intelligence alone" isn't simultaneously for the sake of sentience, by necessity?

In a world full of beings with both sentience and intelligence, these beings will likely want to make full use of any useful intelligence they can find. However, if a highly intelligent flow of information is no way accessible to any sentient being, then how can it benefit them at all? Here is an analogy (emphasis- analogy, not an example). A pilot training in a flight simulator provides an information flow very similar to the information flow in an actual flight. However, the competence of the pilot has no consequences for the safety of any living person unless the pilot applies the skills gained to at least one actual flight. Likewise, an intelligent flow of information has no consequence to any sentient beings as long as its effects are fully isolated from them.

hankconn said:

Based on your intuitive idea of sentience, it follows that animals, plants, bacteria, television sets, and cardboard boxes all have sentience, to some degree (unless I may have gotten you wrong). Every quark of every proton of every atom of every molecule, and all the layers of abstraction and specification in between, all have sentience.

I do not see how any of this follows from my intuitive idea of sentience. I seriously doubt that a cockroach is sentient, much less a cardboard box. David Chalmers did mention something about the possibility of a thermostat possessing a tiny degree of consciousness, but this is part of a speculation that I do not share.

hankconn said:

You can't have an intelligent object.

Couldn’t a computer be an intelligent object?

hankconn said:

Intelligence is a process, and because it's as such, it's sentient.

Are you saying that process=sentience?

hankconn said:

Each idea you have in your head is sentient, because it has an effect on other sentient things- one of which being your physical body, and each one of it's trillions upon trillions of sentient pieces, and quite far beyond.

To the contrary, I would say that none of the information in my brain is sentient. Rather, I would say that sentience is intimate with a tiny part of the information flow in my brain. Sentience is one thing. Something that interacts with sentience is an entirely different thing.

hankconn said:

If there is ANYTHING that has absolutely no effect on any sentient beings, then in what way could we regard such a thing at all (let alone with respect to it's value)?

Of course, something has to have at least a tiny effect on a sentient being for a sentient being to be aware of its existence. However, there are many things that affect sentient beings but which are of no use to them. If you have a computer that is continually performing advanced calculations with speed and accuracy that far exceed human capability, but all its communication ports have permanently packed up, then what use to you are its internal processes?

hankconn said:

How is their amazing place of great and dynamic beauty equivalent to oblivion?

There is no sentience intimate with any of it.

[Clifford Greenblatt]

DonSpanton said

I am still puzzled then, Cliff, as to what exactly you have in mind with your conception of sentience.  I imagined that sentience meant something along the lines of intrinsic, ineffable, phenomenal experience.  Operating on this assumption, qualia would be a legitimate perceptual example.

The problem here is in defining the terms qualia and phenomenal. If qualia is a question of how I see the colour red differently from how another person sees the colour red, then it could simply be a matter of how different brains process neural data differently. There is nothing ineffable about this. In this regard, I am in agreement with Daniel Dennett. The flow of information is not ineffable, but the intimacy of sentience with that information flow is most ineffable.

DonSpanton said

My intuition is that a given wavelength of light must be represented as something.  Hence, my intuition tells me that a philosophical zombie is simply not possible.  With that said, why a perceptual element is represented in the way that it is is completely a mystery to me.
The same goes for thoughts, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc...

Internal representations of colours, along with thoughts, beliefs, desires, emotions, and etc. could be described in terms of an information flow. The mystery is how sentience becomes intimate with a tiny part of this information flow.

Under appropriate conditions, information flow has a very strong influence on sentience. However, the influence of sentience on the information flow is much weaker. There must be some influence, or I could not possibly write or speak about sentience at all. However, the influence is too weak for me to generate information to adequately explain it to others. A philosophical zombie would not likely report that it is sentient, because even the weak influence of sentience on information flow would be absent. To report that it is sentient, the philosophical zombie would require some clever phoney information structure in its mind that would produce the same answers given by a sentient person when questioned about sentience.

[RighteousReason]

Ok, I give up, you are a pack of blithering fucking morons.

[jaydfox]

Heh, ain't "philosophy" grand?

[Clifford Greenblatt]

jaydfox said:

My assumption here is that this "great and dynamic beauty" is relative to sentience, in this case the sentience of the visitor from another universe. The intelligences themselves are not sentiently "aware" of this beauty, even if *mechanically* they respond to and/or produce it.

Beauty could be meaningful to a nonsentient system. This could happen if the system has a pattern recognition structure to it that judges certain kinds of patterns to be superior to other kinds of patterns. The system could become creative by developing structures that increasingly better meet its criteria for pattern or system superiority. This could possibly happen without any sentience being intimate with the information flow in the creative and discerning system.

[jaydfox]

You can't have an intelligent object. Intelligence is a process, and because it's as such, it's sentient.

As long as we're on the subject of blithering, WTFDTM?

[Clifford Greenblatt]

jaydfox said:

Anyway, the point is, this mythical program probably exists, if you could try all ~2^(2^29) programs of 32 MB or less for a particular computer chipset. In fact, there are probably a great number of such programs, some close variations, others quite different but similar in resultant functionality.

The value of this program is tied to its effect on sentients. But if a copy of this program existed by chance in a pattern of matter (or even on a CD created by superbeing with a weird sense of humor) somewhere billions of light-years away (i.e., where it can't affect us sentients), then its "value" is essentially null. It doesn't have intrinsic value.

There is something interesting about the idea of a nonsentient system, that was never designed by any sentient beings, but which creates an information flow that is highly valuable to sentient beings. It presents the question of the influence of sentience on information flow. Your example of a 32 MB programme that is meaningful by pure chance represents a highly improbable circumstance. However, we could ask whether sentience has a strong enough influence on information flow that it would be highly improbable for any system, not designed by sentient entities, to create an information flow that would be highly valuable to sentient entities. My initial post gives a most practical example of this question. According to an atheistic view of origins, our brains were not designed by any sentient being.

[RighteousReason]

philosophy

Love can be so blinding to the facts at times.

There is something interesting about the idea of a nonsentient system, that was never designed by any sentient beings, but which creates an information flow that is highly valuable to sentient beings.

Evolution is a nonsentient system not designed by any intelligent being (I'm using intelligence and sentience as synonyms here), but which creats information flow that is highly valueable to sentient beings.

Your example of a 32 MB programme that is meaningful by pure chance represents a highly improbable circumstance.

The most random 32MB of data could contain any amount of meaning. The meaning is something you percieve there, it's not intrinsic to the information. The information just performs its function (i.e. just "being" there, in whatever medium it is said to "be" such that we can interact with it).

However, we could ask whether sentience has a strong enough influence on information flow that it would be highly improbable for any system, not designed by sentient entities, to create an information flow that would be highly valuable to sentient entities.

The answer is no. I would say humans as we are a valueable information flow created by a non-sentient system. That's the thing about evolution, it tends to incrementally fill in the probability space, and really improbable structures can be and have been achieved through natural selection.

According to an atheistic view of origins, our brains were not designed by any sentient being.

That's kind of misleading. According to any remotely rational, knowledgeable, intelligent entity, homo sapiens sapiens is just a much a point on the evolutionary line as is their precessors homo erectus, homo habilis, and so on all the way down to the LUCA or LUCAs.

[RighteousReason]

According to any remotely rational, knowledgeable, intelligent entity, homo sapiens sapiens is just a much a point on the evolutionary line as is their precessors homo erectus, homo habilis, and so on

And the point being that evolution is a non-intelligent optimization process.

Do you guys think evolution is sentient? (yes, I'm really asking)

[RighteousReason]

This could happen if the system has a pattern recognition structure to it that judges certain kinds of patterns to be superior to other kinds of patterns. The system could become creative by developing structures that increasingly better meet its criteria for pattern or system superiority. This could possibly happen without any sentience being intimate with the information flow in the creative and discerning system.

Ok, you pretty much abstractly defined evolution by natural selection here, so I suppose the answer to my previous question was in the negative.

Which really makes me wonder what is the difference between sentience and intelligence

[jaydfox]

Which really makes me wonder what is the difference between sentience and intelligence

Hank, apparently there is a language barrier here, because you don't seem to be using the common definitions of intelligence or sentience, and you seem to equate them as having the same meaning, which makes communication nearly impossible.

[RighteousReason]

which makes communication nearly impossible

Right, what is that common definition?

[RighteousReason]

Is sentience connected to the idea of "intentionality", or like in the Chinese Room thought experiment kind of sense?

That's what I imagined the common definition represented. That is why I explained how if you take the stance that humans have some kind of vague instinctual spark of intentionality- and that this property is what makes them sentient, then your definition of sentience applies equally well to quarks, rocks, computer programs, and abstract ideas as it does to humans. Clifford says he disagrees:

I do not see how any of this follows from my intuitive idea of sentience. I seriously doubt that a cockroach is sentient, much less a cardboard box. David Chalmers did mention something about the possibility of a thermostat possessing a tiny degree of consciousness, but this is part of a speculation that I do not share.

But if I'm following your concept correctly and this is the key objection, then I would want to argue this point (in order to argue it I would need definitive description of some kind of what this idea of sentience is to which you refer).

This was especially important when Clifford said that sentience is the distinction from oblivion, which makes sense because that would mean anything that is NOT oblivion ... is sentient. (which is basically what I'm saying above)

[RighteousReason]

re: evolution

[Infernity]

Oh gee, how long was it since the last time I had been in such aura of sophisticated thought question, and the elder ones here such as Laz and Don with their entertaining posts heh...(?)

My, I seriously do not know, this is all very, weird and, mmm the intellectual races might could help us and all, but being responsible for the extinguish of another species.... My, tough one. I'll sleep on it. Nah, I won't, I have a huge math exam tomorrow.

-Infernity

[Kalepha]

Hank, what's the matter, dude?

Whenever you perceive others just not getting it, remember that you just don't get it, either. Hank's Law of Rationality.

I generally agree with your view that you seem to have of some variant of panpsychism. Fortunately, it's compatible with sufficiently precise/accurate, causal functionalism. Don's in the same boat, if I recall.

Although we're all probably far from capable of providing some kind of formal proof, we should be able to make some plausible, provisional assumptions that should reduce confusion and disenthrall inflexible conceptual frameworks. At times, it may seem like I'm trying to trivialize sentience. Generally, I'm really not. If it appears that way, it's only because I want to get a feeling for the barriers that eventually will need demolishing.

(Jay, I'm again bringing up aspects of a discussion we had awhile ago, to which you had a good response. I wanted to consider it here, but regretfully I couldn't find it. Please point me to it if you can.)

The problem with thinking about sentience is that, initially, I might presuppose that I can simulate or model an instance of it in the same general sense that I can simulate or model a supposedly nonsentient phenomenon or engineering outcome. When I make this presupposition, my implicit propositional attitude is that I should be satisfied with both sentient and nonsentient outcomes by touching and looking at them. But this causes problems for my philosophy of mind if I don't invoke some variant of Kant's distinction between noumena and phenomena.

Merely to be nudged in that direction, we ought to understand that any measurement, in the way we thus far perceive any, is a representation in the mind. We don't need to know the exact nature of this representation to be quite certain that it isn't equivalent to its causal origination, the actual instance of the identified event. To be nudged further, it ought to be intuitively clear that we can't compute many sufficiently fine details as quickly as and in the same way extrinsic nature does. Hence, it seems the pitfall is overglorifying mental representations, to the extent that it's forgotten that there is a nature and it exists with or without widely various degrees of mental augmentation.

Being so nudged, I'm inclined, then, as I also suggest, not to read too much into thought experiments that presume more understanding of its elemental concepts than there actually is. Do you know how to design and reproduce sentience from raw materials? Do you know how to design and reproduce intelligence from raw materials? If you can't imagine how, in principle, you could design and reproduce an actual product in question, then it's probably better to be a bit more suspicious of your own comprehension and especially of anything you try to construct from it. And if you want to be superrigorous, be suspicious of your own comprehension if you can't reproduce an actual product in question simply by thinking it.

[RighteousReason]

Nate,

Everything you say is genius [lol]

I don't claim to prescribe to any such views, although panpsychism is a description of what I was talking about earlier. I think when people use words like consciousness, qualia, sentience, and other vague hand-waving philosophical keywords (souls), they often form complicated tautological mappings which add lots of mostly useless or misleading complexity.

Edited by hankconn, 20 May 2006 - 07:26 PM.

[DJS]

Being so nudged, I'm inclined, then, as I also suggest, not to read too much into thought experiments that presume more understanding of its elemental concepts than there actually is. Do you know how to design and reproduce sentience from raw materials? Do you know how to design and reproduce intelligence from raw materials? If you can't imagine how, in principle, you could design and reproduce an actual product in question, then it's probably better to be a bit more suspicious of your own comprehension and especially of anything you try to construct from it. And if you want to be superrigorous, be suspicious of your own comprehension if you can't reproduce an actual product in question simply by thinking it.

Indeed, this (sentience) may be an issue we shouldn't concern ourselves with until our major engineering project moves from minds to universes.

[DJS]

Clifford

Internal representations of colours, along with thoughts, beliefs, desires, emotions, and etc. could be described in terms of an information flow. The mystery is how sentience becomes intimate with a tiny part of this information flow.

Maybe this will help. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentionality

Clifford

Under appropriate conditions, information flow has a very strong influence on sentience. However, the influence of sentience on the information flow is much weaker. There must be some influence, or I could not possibly write or speak about sentience at all. However, the influence is too weak for me to generate information to adequately explain it to others. A philosophical zombie would not likely report that it is sentient, because even the weak influence of sentience on information flow would be absent. To report that it is sentient (NO!), the philosophical zombie would require (NO!) some clever phoney information structure (NO!) (THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU!) in its mind that would produce (NO!) the same answers given (NO!) by a sentient person (THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU!) (THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU!) when questioned about sentience.

Sorry Cliff, but violating the parameters of the philosophical zombie thought experiment is one of my biggest pet peeves and I'm afraid you had to pay the price.

[DJS]

NateB

I generally agree with your view that you seem to have of some variant of panpsychism. Fortunately, it's compatible with sufficiently precise/accurate, causal functionalism. Don's in the same boat, if I recall.

Yes Nate, as of late I have been moving in that direction although, surprisingly, the impetus for this movement has not been coming from my contemplations of consciousness, but cosmology.

I'm also not sure that I'd like to be associated directly with panpsychism - much of the literature I've read on it strikes me as fluffy mystical nonsense, but I'm still exploring the framework so who knows.

[Clifford Greenblatt]

I am having difficulty understanding why an information cannot have intentional objects without sentience. Suppose the information system has sensors that gather some data about a tree. It processes the data and makes decisions as to how to properly prune the tree. The system then commands robot arms to make a series of specific cuts on the tree. The tree is the object of the system’s intentions about pruning. This does not make the information system sentient, unless sentience is being defined in a much different way than I understand it.

DonSpanton said:

Sorry Cliff, but violating the parameters of the philosophical zombie thought experiment is one of my biggest pet peeves and I'm afraid you had to pay the price.

If you define consciousness in a way that does not necessarily entail sentience, then I agree that I have violated the parameters of the philosophical zombie experiment. If you define consciousness in a way that necessarily entails sentience, then I do not see how I violated those parameters, unless the intentional object of your idea of sentience differs significantly from the intentional object of my idea of sentience. If you are defining consciousness in terms of intentional mental states, then anything with intentional mental states would, by definition, have to be conscious. However, I regard intentional mental states as a property of the physical information flow rather than as a property of sentience. They are states because they can be represented by numerical quantities. They are intentional because they represent objects of mental intent. They are mental because they are in the brain. Information flow is a necessary condition for sentience but not a sufficient condition. Sentience is intimate with certain kinds of information flow but is not itself an information flow.

THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU!

Perhaps they would laugh at me because we use the same words to express completely different meanings. Language barriers can lead to much frustration.

Do you regard sentience as a certain kind of information flow or do you regard sentience as something which is intimate with certain kinds of information flows but which is not an information flow itself?

[Kalepha]

I'm also not sure that I'd like to be associated directly with panpsychism - much of the literature I've read on it strikes me as fluffy mystical nonsense, but I'm still exploring the framework so who knows.

You're probably right, Don. It usually might not be necessary to pay it lip service if we're merely considering and reorganizing some propositions that happen to correspond with the recognized subject matter. And come to think of it, one probably doesn't have much business liberally attributing sentience to anything with existence-granting intrinsic properties. Panpsychism is going too far, perhaps, if we only want to express the plausibility that human mental representations are insufficient with respect to the possible negative consequences from denying their insufficiency, one of them being the regarding of sentience as holy mystery and of observation with human sensory modalities as holy fact.

[Clifford Greenblatt]

NateBarna said:

Do you know how to design and reproduce intelligence from raw materials?

Yes. I have designed and constructed very simple intelligence from raw materials. This intelligence was an extremely simple intelligence, but I do not know of any rule that sets a high value to the lower bound for the complexity of intelligence.

NateBarna said:

Do you know how to design and reproduce sentience from raw materials?

What raw materials? A large pile of manure has all the atoms in it to construct a highly intelligent and sentient human. You just need to know how to properly arrange them. You do not require any understanding about sentience to do this.

Here is a futuristic but practical example of constructing beings that are both sentient and highly intelligent from atoms that once composed waste matter. A small community agrees to travel to a distant star. The journey will take a thousand years to complete. A nuclear reactor supplies sufficient energy for the entire journey. A food chain in the spaceship permits waste matter to be recycled into nutritious food and ensures a good supply of oxygen in the small, closed, ecosystem. Eventually, all of the inhabitants of the spaceship will be composed of atoms that formally composed waste matter. The designers of the ecosystem may know only a tiny bit about the biological processes in the food chain and may know nothing at all about sentience, but they will have technically succeeded in designing a system to construct intelligent and sentient humans from waste matter. An objection to the significance of the ecosystem example could be that the designers required much help from nature. Well, all of our creative activity requires much help from nature.

[Kalepha]

Clifford, your response is probably functionalist, with which I currently don't have a problem. Our creative activity probably will only get better as we manipulate nature increasingly more fundamentally to manipulate ourselves in turn, putting more emphasis on this for a good while before piling on too many unrelated beliefs and goals designed with and for severely suboptimal functions.

[Edit: diction.]

Edited by Nate Barna, 21 May 2006 - 10:25 PM.