On 16.01.2012 10:24 Bruno Marchal said the following:
…
>
> Note also that Turing invented his test to avoid the philosophical
> hard issue of consciousness. In a nutshell Turing defines
> “consciousness” by “having an intelligent behavior”. The Turing test
> is equivalent with a type of “no zombie” principle.
>
On 16.01.2012 11:20 Bruno Marchal said the following:
>
> On 15 Jan 2012, at 09:13, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
>>
>> What about the Turing test for a person in that state to check if
>> he still has consciousness?
>
> As I said in another post, the very idea of the Turing test consists
> in avoiding completely the notion of consciousness. I do disagree
> with Turing on this. We can build a theory of consciousness,
> including, like with comp, a theory having refutable consequences.
> Turing was still influenced by Vienna-like positivism.
Bruno, below there are quotes from Jaron Lanier on Turing Test from his book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, 2010 (http://www.jaronlanier.com/)
From the chapter The Apple Falls Again.
“The second thing to know about Turing is that he was gay at a time when it was illegal to be gay. British authorities, thinking they were doing the most compassionate thing, coerced him into a quack medical treatment that was supposed to correct his homosexuality. It consisted, bizarrely, of massive infusions of female hormones.”
“In order to understand how someone could have come up with that plan, you have to remember that before computers came along, the steam engine was a preferred metaphor for understanding human nature. All that sexual pressure was building up and causing the machine to malfunction, so the opposite essence, the female kind, ought to balance it out and reduce the pressure. This story should serve as a cautionary tale. The common use of computers, as we understand them today, as sources for models and metaphors of ourselves is probably about as reliable as the use of the steam engine was back then.”
“Turing developed breasts and other female characteristics and became terribly depressed. He committed suicide by lacing an apple with cyanide in his lab and eating it. Shortly before his death, he presented the world with a spiritual idea, which must be evaluated separately from his technical achievements. This is the famous Turing test. It is extremely rare for a genuinely new spiritual idea to appear, and it is yet another example of Turing‟s genius that he came up with one.”
“Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.”
“Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?”
“It‟s impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures.”
“When Turing died, software was still in such an early state that no one knew what a mess it would inevitably become as it grew. Turing imagined a pristine, crystalline form of existence in the digital realm, and I can imagine it might have been a comfort to imagine a form of life apart from the torments of the body and the politics of sexuality. It’s notable that it is the woman who is replaced by the computer, and that Turing’s suicide echoes Eve’s fall”.
One of the controversies there was the question whether the Universe if eternal or not. Recently I have employed the logic from the lectures on the everything list
when there was a comment about determinism. I hope that the dialog below shows that philosophy could be sometimes useful.
A. “we also know that everything, absolutely positively everything, happens for a reason OR it does not happen for a reason.”
B. “What about Big Bang? It has also happened for a reason?”
A. “I have no idea, but I do know it happened for a reason or it did not happen for a reason.”
B. “Well, then you have an infinite progression, as then you have to find a reason for that reason and so on.”
C. “The idea of the Big Bang is that the visible universe evolved to its present state from a state of extreme density and temperature. It is independent of whether there was a previous state, as in the models of Andre Vilenkin or those of Sean Carroll, or not as in the Hartle-Hawking model.”
B. “This still shows that there are physicists who do not believe in
but we also know that everything, absolutely positively everything, happens for a reason OR it does not happen for a reason.
In other words such a statement does not follow from physics that we know. ”
C. “Of course it doesn’t follow from physics. It follows from the meaning of the words (assuming it refers to things that happen). It’s a tautology. ”
B. “It is a good point but then the question is what this tautology has to do with the external world (provided we assume that there is some).”
A. “Yes, but there is nothing illogical about infinite progressions; or maybe the Big Bang happened for no reason, nothing illogical about that either.”
B. ”This would contradict with your previous statement:
but we also know that everything, absolutely positively everything, happens for a reason OR it does not happen for a reason.”
A. “A chain of “why” or “how” questions eventually comes to a end or they do not, and there is nothing illogical about either possibility.”
B. ”Well, it would be good if you explain how such a statement agrees with your previous statement, quoted above. In my view, they contradict with each other.”
A. “What the hell are you talking about? The Big Bang happened for a reason OR the Big Bang happened for no reason.”
B. “I would say though that “something does not happen for a reason” and “something happens for no reason” are two completely different statements.
If however you accept that “something happens for no reason“, then I do not understand your problems with free will. In the latter case, I freely for no reason just do something, there is the problem then.”
Jason Resch on the everything list maked a link to a nice video
20.01.2012 02:34 Jason Resch: “Some have argued that cars are alive. They evolve, consume, move, reproduce and so on. While they are dependent on humans for reproduction, we too depend on a a very specific environment to reproduce. Much like viruses.”
A nice video. Thanks for a link. Yet, it is unclear to me what is evolvable matter. In the lecture, the lector has several times said “cells compete” and indeed he needs a competition to come to evolution. However, in my view “a cell competes” is close to “a cell perceives” and what this exactly means is for me a puzzle. Let us think about this along the next series:
A rock – a ballcock in a toilet – an automatic door – a self-driving car – a cell.
When competition comes into play? Does a self-driving car already competes? Does a ballcock competes? What does it actually mean “a cell competes”?
On 14.01.2012 08:21 John Clark said the following:
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 Craig Weinberg<whatsonster@gmail.com> wrote:
…
> For heavens sake, I went into quite a lot of detail about how the
> code is executed so that protein gets made, and it could not be more
> clear that the cell factory contains digital machines.
>
>> They are not information.
>>
>
> According to you nothing is information and that is one reason it is
> becoming increasingly difficult to take anything you say seriously.
I should say that I also have difficulty with the term information. A question would for example if information belongs to physics or not. Some physicists say that information is related to the entropy and as such it is a basic physical quantity. I personally do not buy it, as thermodynamics, as it has been designed, had nothing to do with information and information as such brings nothing to help to solve thermodynamics problem (more to this end in [1]).
Let us consider for example a conventional thermodynamic problem: improving efficiency of a motor. Is the information concept is helpful to solve this problem? If we look at modern motors, then we see that nowadays they are working together with controllers that allows us to drive the efficiency to the thermodynamic limit. The term information is helpful indeed to develop a controller but what about the thermodynamic limit of a motor? Does information helps here? In my view, not.
In the Gray’s book on consciousness ( Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem) there is an interesting statement on if physics is enough to explain biology. Gray’s answer is yes provided we add cybernetics laws and evolution. Let me leave evolution aside and discuss the cybernetics laws only as this is exactly where, I think, information comes into play. A good short video from the Artificial Intelligence Class that I have recently attended would be a good introduction (an intelligent agent sensing external information and then acting):
Thus, the question would be about the relationship between physics and cybernetics laws. When we consider the Equation of Everything, are the cybernetics laws already there or we still need to introduce them separately? One of possible answers would be that the cybernetics laws emerge or supervene on the physics laws. I however does not understand what this means. It probably has something to do with a transition between quantity and quality, but I do not understand how it happens either. For myself, it remains a magic.
Let me repeat a series from physical objects discussed already recently (see also [2][3]):
1) A rock;
2) A ballcock in the toilet;
3) A self-driving car;
4) A living cell.
Where do we have the cybernetics laws (information) and where not? Can physics describe these objects without the cybernetics laws? What emergence and superveniece mean along this series? Any idea?
>”Some physicists say that information is related to the entropy”
That is incorrect, ALL physicists say that information is related to entropy. There are quite a number of definitions of entropy, one I like, although not as rigorous as some it does convey the basic idea: entropy is a measure of the number of ways the microscopic structure of something can be changed without changing the macroscopic properties. Thus, the living human body has very low entropy because there are relatively few changes that could be made in it without a drastic change in macroscopic properties, like being dead; a bucket of water has a much higher entropy because there are lots of ways you could change the microscopic position of all those water molecules and it would still look like a bucket of water; cool the water and form ice and you have less entropy because the molecules line up into a orderly lattice so there are fewer changes you could make. The ultimate in high entropy objects is a Black Hole because whatever is inside one on the outside any Black Hole can be completely described with just 3 numbers, its mass, spin and electrical charge. ”
18.01.2012 20:13 Evgenii Rudnyi: “If you look around you may still find species of scientists who still are working with classical thermodynamics (search for example for CALPHAD). Well, if you refer to them as physicists or not, it is your choice. Anyway in experimental thermodynamics people determine entropies, for example from CODATA tables
Do you mean that 1 mole of Ag has more information than 1 mole of Al at 298.15 K?
Also remember that at constant volume dS = (Cv/T) dT and dU = CvdT. If the entropy is information then its derivative must be related to information as well. Hence Cv must be related to information. This however means that the energy also somehow related to information.
Finally, the entropy is defined by the Second Law and the best would be to stick to this definition. Only in this case, it is possible to understand what we are talking about.”
18.01.2012 23:42 Russell Standish: “Evgenii, while you may be right that some physicists (mostly experimentalists) work in thermodynamics without recourse to the notion of information, and chemists even more so, it is also true that the modern theoretical understanding of entropy (and indeed thermodynamics) is information-based.
This trend really became mainstream with Landauer’s work demonstrating thermodynamic limits of information processing in the 1960s, which turned earlier speculations by the likes of Schroedinger and Brillouin into something that couldn’t be ignored, even by experimentalists.
This trend of an information basis to physics has only accelerated in my professional lifetime – I’ve seen people like Hawking discuss information processing of black holes, and we’ve see concepts like the Beckenstein bound linking geometry of space to information capacity. David Deutsch is surely backing a winning horse to point out that algorithmic information theory must be a foundational strand of the “fabric of reality”. ”
19.01.2012 20:03 Evgenii Rudnyi: “I know that many physicists identify the entropy with information. Recently I had a nice discussion on biotaconv and people pointed out that presumably Edwin T. Jaynes was the first to make such a connection (Information theory and statistical mechanics, 1957). Google Scholar shows that his paper has been cited more than 5000 times, that is impressive and it shows indeed that this is in a way mainstream.
I have studied Jaynes papers but I have been stacked with for example
“With such an interpretation the expression “irreversible process” represents a semantic confusion; it is not the physical process that is irreversible, but rather our ability to follow it. The second law of thermodynamics then becomes merely the statement that although our information as to the state of a system may be lost in a variety of ways, the only way in which it can be gained is by carrying out further measurements.”
“It is important to realize that the tendency of entropy to increase is not a consequence of the laws of physics as such, … . An entropy increase may occur unavoidably, due to our incomplete knowledge of the forces acting on a system, or it may be entirely voluntary act on our part.”
This is above of my understanding. As I have mentioned, I do not buy it, I still consider the entropy as it has been defined by for example Gibbs.
Basically I do not understand what the term information then brings. One can certainly state that information is the same as the entropy (we are free with definitions after all). Yet I miss the meaning of that. Let me put it this way, we have the thermodynamic entropy and then the informational entropy as defined by Shannon. The first used to designe a motor and the second to design a controller. Now let us suppose that these two entropies are the same. What this changes in a design of a motor and a controller? In my view nothing.
By the way, have you seen the answer to my question:
>> Also remember that at constant volume dS = (Cv/T) dT and dU =
>> CvdT. If the entropy is information then its derivative must be
>> related to information as well. Hence Cv must be related to
>> information. This however means that the energy also somehow
>> related to information.
If the entropy is the same as information, than through the derivatives all thermodynamic properties are related to information as well. I am not sure if this makes sense in respect for example to design a self-driving car.
I am aware of works that estimated the thermodynamic limit (kT) to process information. I do not see however, how this proves the equivalence of information and entropy.
“The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory. Here order is described as the carrier of information, because information is defined as the opposite of entropy, and entropy is a measure of disorder. To transmit information means to induce order. This sounds reasonable enough. Next, since entropy grows with the probability of a state of affairs, information does the opposite: it increases with its improbability. The less likely an event is to happen, the more information does its occurrence represent. This again seems reasonable. Now what sort of sequence of events will be least predictable and therefore carry a maximum of information? Obviously a totally disordered one, since when we are confronted with chaos we can never predict what will happen next. The conclusion is that total disorder provides a maximum of information; and since information is measured by order, a maximum of order is conveyed by a maximum of disorder. Obviously, this is a Babylonian muddle. Somebody or something has confounded our language.” “
20.01.2012 05:59 Russell Standish: “Because I tend to think of “negentropy”, which is really another term for information, I tend to give priority to Schroedinger who wrote about the topic in the early 40s. But Jaynes was certainly instrumental in establishing the information based foundations to statistical physics, even before information was properly defined (it wasn’t really until the likes of Kolmogorov, Chaitin and Solomonoff in the 60s that information was really understood.
But Landauer in the late 60s was probably the first to make physicists really wake up to the concept of physical information.
But then, I’m not a science historian, so what would I know.
I can well recommend Denbigh & Denbigh’s book from the 80s – its a bit more of a modern understanding of the topic than Jaynes.”
21.01.2012 13:25 Evgenii Rudnyi: “Thanks. On biotaconv they have recommended John Avery’s Information Theory and Evolution
but I think I have already satisfied my curiosity with Jaynes’s two papers. My personal feeling is as follows:
1) The concept of information is useless in conventional thermodynamic problems. Let us take for example the Fe-C phase diagram
What information has to do with the entropies of the phases in this phase diagram? Do you mean that I find an answer in Denbigh’s book?
2) If physicists say that information is the entropy, they must take it literally and then apply experimental thermodynamics to measure information. This however seems not to happen.
3) I am working with engineers developing mechatronics products. Thermodynamics (hence the entropy) is there as well as information. However, I have not met a practitioner yet who makes a connection between the entropy and information.”
22.01.2012 10:04 Evgenii Rudnyi: “To be concrete. This is for example a paper from control
The term information is there but the entropy not. Could you please explain why? Or alternatively could you please point out to papers where engineers use the concept of the equivalence between the entropy and information?”
22.01.2012 19:16 Evgenii Rudnyi: “I have read your paper
It is well written. Could you please apply the principles from your paper to a problem on how to determine information in a book (for example let us take your book Theory of Nothing)?
Also do you believe earnestly that this information is equal to the thermodynamic entropy of the book? If yes, can one determine the information in the book just by means of experimental thermodynamics?”
25.01.2012 20:47 Evgenii Rudnyi: “Let me suggest a very simple case to understand better what you are saying. Let us consider a string “10″ for simplicity. Let us consider the next cases. I will cite first the thermodynamic properties of Ag and Al from CODATA tables (we will need them)
S ° (298.15 K)
J K-1 mol-1
Ag cr 42.55 ± 0.20
Al cr 28.30 ± 0.10
In J K-1 cm-3 it will be
Ag cr 42.55/107.87*10.49 = 4.14
Al cr 28.30/26.98*2.7 = 2.83
1) An abstract string “10″ as the abstract book above.
2) Let us make now an aluminum plate (a page) with “10″ hammered on it (as on a coin) of the total volume 10 cm^3. The thermodynamic entropy is then 28.3 J/K.
3) Let us make now a silver plate (a page) with “10″ hammered on it (as on a coin) of the total volume 10 cm^3. The thermodynamic entropy is then 41.4 J/K.
4) We can easily make another aluminum plate (scaling all dimensions from 2) to the total volume of 100 cm^3. Then the thermodynamic entropy is 283 J/K.
Now we have four different combinations to represent a string “10″ and the thermodynamic entropy is different. If we take the statement literally then the information must be different in all four cases and defined uniquely as the thermodynamic entropy is already there. Yet in my view this makes little sense.
Could you please comment on this four cases?”
25.01.2012 21:25 Brent: “The thermodynamic entropy is a measure of the information required to locate the possible states of the plates in the phase space of atomic configurations constituting them. Note that the thermodynamic entropy you quote is really the *change* in entropy per degree at the given temperature. It’s a measure of how much more phase space becomes available to the atomic states when the internal energy is increased. More available phase space means more uncertainty of the exact actual state and hence more information entropy. This information is enormous compared to the “01″ stamped on the plate, the shape of the plate or any other aspects that we would normally use to convey information. It would only be in case we cooled the plate to near absolute zero and then tried to encode information in its microscopic vibrational states that the thermodynamic and the encoded information entropy would become similar. ”
27.01.2012 20:21 Evgenii Rudnyi: “I would say that from your answer it follows that engineering information has nothing to do with the thermodynamic entropy. Don’t you agree?
It would certainly interesting to consider what happens when we decrease the temperature (in the limit to zero Kelvin). According to the Third Law the entropy will be zero then. What do you think, can we save less information on a copper plate at low temperatures as compared with higher temperatures? Or more?”
27.01.2012 21:43 Evgenii Rudnyi: “I am just trying to understand the meaning of the term information that you use. I would say that there is the thermodynamic entropy and then the Shannon information entropy. The Shannon has developed a theory to help engineers to deal with communication (I believe that you have also recently a similar statement). Yet, in my view when we talk about communication devices and mechatronics, the information that engineers are interested in has nothing to do with the thermodynamic entropy. Do you agree or disagree with that? If you disagree, could you please give an example from engineering where engineers do employ the thermodynamic entropy as the estimate of information. My example would be Millipede
I am pretty sure that when IBM engineers develop it, they do not employ the thermodynamic entropy to estimate its information capabilities. Also, the increase of temperature would be destroy saved information there.
Well, I might be deliberately obtuse indeed. Yet with the only goal to reach a clear definition of what the information is. Right now I would say that there is information in engineering and in physics and they are different. The first I roughly understand and the second not.”
28.01.2012 12:05 Evgenii Rudnyi: “If engineers would take the statement “the maximum possible value for information increases with temperature” literally, they should operate a hard disk at higher temperatures (the higher the better according to such a statement). Yet this does not happens. Do you know why?
In general we are surrounded devices that store information (hard discs, memory sticks, DVD, etc.). The information that these devices can store, I believe, is known with accuracy to one bit. Can you suggest a thermodynamic state which entropy gives us exactly that amount of information?
Here would be again a question about temperature. If I operate my memory stick in some reasonable range of temperatures, the information it contains does not change. Yet, the entropy in my view changes.”
14.01.2012 18:12 John Clark: “To do any one of the things you suggest would require intelligence, and indeed there is some evidence that in general social animals tend to have a larger brain than similar species that are not social. But at any rate we both seem to agree that Evolution can only see behavior, so consciousness must be a byproduct of some sort of complex behavior. Thus the Turing Test must be valid not only for intelligence but for consciousness too.”
14.01.2012 19:15: “How would you generalize the Turing Test for consciousness?”
14.01.2012 19:56 Stephen P. King: “Perhaps we can generalize the Turing test by insisting on questions that would require for their answer computational resources in excess of that would be available to a computer + power suply in a small room. Think of the Berkenstein bound http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound…. But the Turing Test is a bit of an oxymoron because it is impossible to prove the existence of something that is solely 1p. There is no 3p of consciousness. I recall Leibniz’ discussion http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/ of this…”
14.01.2012 09:13: There are experiments that demonstrate that a monkey has conscious experience, see for example a short description
Hence, how would you generalize the Turing test to check if a monkey has consciousness?
It well might be that between mind and consciousness there is no 1 to 1 relationship. For example let us take people with Alzheimer’s disease in the advanced phase (from Wikipedia)
“During this last stage of AD, the person is completely dependent upon caregivers.[25] Language is reduced to simple phrases or even single words, eventually leading to complete loss of speech.[25][29] Despite the loss of verbal language abilities, people can often understand and return emotional signals.[25] Although aggressiveness can still be present, extreme apathy and exhaustion are much more common results.[25] People with AD will ultimately not be able to perform even the simplest tasks without assistance.[25] Muscle mass and mobility deteriorate to the point where they are bedridden, and they lose the ability to feed themselves.[25] AD is a terminal illness, with the cause of death typically being an external factor, such as infection of pressure ulcers or pneumonia, not the disease itself.[25]“
What about the Turing test for a person in that state to check if he still has consciousness?
13.01.2012 21:54. In my favorite book on consciousness (by Jeffrey Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem) there is chapter 7 “A survival value for consciousness” that is summarized on p. 90:
“Whatever consciousness is, it is too important to be a mere accidental by-product of other biological forces. A strong reason to suppose that conscious experience has survival value in this. It is only by appealing to evolutionary selection pressures that we can explain the good fit that exists between our perception of the world and our actions in dealing with it, or between my perceptions and yours. Biological characteristics that are not under strong selection pressure show random drift which would be expected to destroy the fit. I assume, therefore, that consciousness has a survival value on its own right. That rules out epiphenomenalism, but leaves us with a problem of identifying the casual effect of consciousness in its own right.”
By the way in the Gray’s book the term intelligence is not even in the index. This was the biggest surprise for me because I always thought that consciousness and intelligence are related. Yet, after reading the book, I agree now with the author that conscious experience is a separate phenomenon.
13.01.2012 22:36 Brent: “I think he may go wrong there. If you like Julian Jaynes’ theory of the origin of consciousness: a kind internalized perception of speech that evolved because of co-opting brain structures used for hearing and language processing. Then, because it is sharing the same processing for inner narrative and for social exchange the two can’t drift apart.”
13.01.2012 23:50: I would say that before speech there was music. And without conscious experience music is not possible. How sound waves form music without consciousness? Hence Julian Jaynes’ theory does not impress me.
13.01.2012 22:36 Brent: “Intelligence, the modeling of oneself and ones relations to others has survival value and this is tied through language to internal narratives. I think there could be intelligence which did this modeling in someway not shared with external perception and while it would be conscious in the sense of having an internal model of itself and its relations, it’s consciousness might be different from ours. We can imagine this in part by considering changes to our own consciousness. If you’re like me, more of your thinking is in words and images than in talking pictures. But suppose there were implanted in your brain an internet connection. Of course we developed the internet so it has a lot of written language and pictures; but suppose for some reason the internet connection in your brain only transmitted youtube.videos. So when you thought of Obama, instead of the word “Obama” or a picture of him springing to mind, a video of him would spring to mind. This would be a qualitative change in your consciousness. ”
13.01.2012 23:50: The main question here is how unconscious process in the brain produce conscious experience. Say, there is some problem and it is necessary to make choices. A person who has no idea what to do goes to sleep and in the morning he has a conscious experience of a very good solution that has been prepared unconsciously during the sleep. Then a question is how to make a border between conscious and unconscious. Or you believe that the both phenomena are the same?
14.01.2012 03:06 Brent: “So does Gray think that beings can be conscious without being
intelligent or intelligent without being conscious?”
14.01.2012 09:08: The first part is definite yes, for example “But we can, I believe, safely assume that mammals possess conscious experience.”
There is no clear answer for the second part in the book. Well, for example
“Language, for example, cannot be necessary for conscious experience. The reverse, however, may be true: it may be that language (and other functions) could not be evolved in the absence of conscious experience”.
It depends however on the definition, I would say that a self-driving car is intelligent and a rock not, but even in this case it is not completely clear to me how to define it unambiguously.
Gray’s personal position is that consciousness survival values is “late error detection” that happens through some multipurpose and multi-functional display. This fits actually quite good in cybernetics but leaves a question open about the nature of such a display.
Science has just recently started to research on conscious experience and so far this phenomenon has not been repeated in vitro yet. Moreover, it seems that the modern science does not have means to describe it:
p.5. “To put this Hard Problem into a preliminary nut-shell: it arises because nothing in our current theoretical models of brain and behavior accounts for the existence of conscious experience, still less for its detailed properties.”
This shows that we have to wait for more research in this direction to give a precise definition.
On other other hand, it is relatively easy to observe conscious experience, if you start from yourself. The experience of 3D visual world, music, feeling, etc. These phenomena must be researched, I do not believe it is a good idea to neglect them just because the current state of science cannot explain them.
The results described in Gray’s book show that conscious phenomena are rather slow, it takes about a quarter of a second to form conscious phenomena. In comparison, the unconscious feedback loops are by an order of magnitude faster. This means that common reasoning “I saw something and then I have done it” is actually wrong. We get in conscious experience already results made unconsciously. Gray’s hypothesis is that the conscious experience is kind of a multi-functional display created by the brain to allow for late error correction. However, he stresses in his book that right now we have no idea how that display is created and functions.
In any case, in his book you will find the description of many experiments in this respect.
The hard problem of consciousness is not to explain intellect, this presumably could be done. The hard problem is conscious experience and this must be researched further.
Let me finish by two more quotes from Gray. First the hard problem put differently:
p. 40. “Given, that there is a scientific story that goes seamlessly from sensory input to behavioural output without reference to consciousness then, when we try to add conscious experience back into the story, we can’t find anything for it to do. Consciousness, it seems, has no casual powers, it stands outside the casual chain.”
Second that a conscious life does exist:
p. 7. “So be prepared to discover that much of your consciousness life is illusory. But cling, nonetheless, to that fundamental rock upon which Descartes built his great conceptual edifice (no matter how unsatisfactory it turned out to be in other respects): whatever else may be an illusion, the fact that you have a conscious life cannot be. For it is in consciousness that illusions are created: no consciousness, no possibility of illusion.
) there is an interesting statement on if physics is enough to explain biology. Gray’s answer is yes provided we add cybernetics laws and evolution. Let me leave evolution aside and discuss the cybernetics laws only as this is exactly where, I think, information comes into play. A good short video from the Artificial Intelligence Class that I have recently attended would be a good introduction (an intelligent agent sensing external information and then acting):
by Arnheim, 1971, it is really nice.
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