Hi Frank,
The problem is that one has immediately to ask, what is the contrast class of experiencing consciousness? Experiencing non-consciousness? I think for your line of thinking, where consciousness is direct, that’s an oxymoron. For my line of thinking, when I woke up from my surgery and 24 hours had passed, I had a powerful experience of my non-consciousness. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:33 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow 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 <jonzing...@gmail.com <mailto:jonzing...@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 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
