[ExI] Trilemma of Consciousness

Sat May 27 23:22:30 UTC 2017

On Sat, May 27, 2017 at 3:43 PM, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

>
> 
> I am certain that consciousness and intelligence are correlated. After all
> intelligence is a semantic property as well. But they might be seperable.
> Like the stroke victim who is aware of everything going on around him but
> lacks the motor control with which to express "intelligent behavior".
>

I
intelligent behavior
 implies consciousness but the lack of 
I
intelligent behavior
 does not imply a lack of consciousness or even a lack of intelligence;
Einstein may be awake and alert but just not prefer to say or write
anything at the moment and would rather just sit there and think. For all I
know rocks may be doing the same thing.

> > 
> something could behave intelligently and not be conscious.

Maybe. If true I could be the only conscious being in the universe and
maybe I am, but I sorta doubt it.

> 
> If you think that fact holds down to the level of a single bit flipping
> 
> its value, then you would belong to the "consciousness is trivial"
> 
> school.
>

Well, I do belong to the school that intelligence is a far harder nut to
crack than consciousness, and a much more interesting one too.   

> > 
> I
> 
> am stuck with a result restricted to Turing machines.
>

That doesn't sound like much of a restriction to me. What intelligent
behavior can a non-Turing Machine perform that a Turing Machine can't?

> > 
> I am saying that the Turing test won't be conclusive for either
> intelligence or consciousness

I agree the Turing Test is not conclusive but it's all we've got and all
we'll ever have. There will always be ch
arlatan
s who's only skill is the ability to fool people into thinking they are
smarter than they really are, and nobody will ever prove that rocks are
smart but shy, but one does the best one can with the tools at hand.

> 
> What I am saying is that due to Rice's Theorem, any Turing-like test for
> any semantic property (consciousness, intelligence, etc.) applied to a
> Turing machine is reducible to the halting problem

Forget semantic, all problems period are reducible to a halting problem.
Sometimes the problem will halt, that is to say we'll find the answer,
sometimes it won't halt and our brain makes a judgement call and causes us
to become bored, so we give up, stop, and look for a different problem.
Maybe it's the wrong call, maybe 5 more seconds will produce the answer,
maybe 5 hours, maybe 5 billion years, maybe never. Turing tells us there is
no way to know.     

> >
>> > 
>> consciousness theory#93,642: conscious beings must be squishy
>
>
> > 
> Well people who think that belong to the "consciousness is null" school.
> Unfortunately my theorem does not rule that out either.
>

Yep, that consciousness theory is as good (or bad) as any other
consciousness theory.

 John K Clark
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