[ExI] A new theory of consciousness: conditionalism

Sat Aug 26 14:25:59 UTC 2023

Thank you John for your thoughts. I few notes below:

On Sat, Aug 26, 2023 at 7:17 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 1:47 PM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> *> At a high level, states of consciousness are states of knowledge,*
>>
>
> That is certainly true, but what about the reverse, does a high state of
> knowledge imply consciousness?  I'll never be able to prove it but I
> believe it does but of course for this idea to be practical there must be
> some way of demonstrating that the thing in question does indeed have a
> high state of knowledge, and the test for that is the Turing Test, and
> the fact that my fellow human beings have passed the Turing test is the
> only reason I believe that I am NOT the only conscious being in the
> universe.
>

Yes, I believe there's an identity between states of knowledge and states
of consciousness. That is almost implicit in the definition of
consciousness:
con- means "with"
-scious- means "knowledge"
-ness means "the state of being"
con-scious-ness -> the state of being with knowledge.

Then, the question becomes: what is a state of knowledge? How do we
implement or instantiate a knowledge state, physically or otherwise?

My intuition is that it requires a process of differentiation, such that
some truth becomes entangled with the system's existence.

>
> *> A conditional is a means by which a system can enter/reach a state of
>> knowledge (i.e. a state of consciousness) if and only if some fact is true.*
>>
>
> Then "conditional" is not a useful philosophical term because you could be
> conscious of and know a lot about Greek mythology. but none of it is true
> except for the fact that Greek mythology is about Greek mythology.
>

Yes. Here, the truth doesn't have to be some objective truth, it can be
truth of what causes ones mind to reach a particular state. E.g., here it
would be the truth of what particular sensory data came into the scholar's
eyes as he read a book of Greek mythology.

> >  *Consciousness is revealed as an immaterial, ephemeral relation, not
>> any particular physical thing we can point at or hold.*
>>
>
> I mostly agree with that but that doesn't imply there's anything mystical
> going on, information is also immaterial and you can't point to *ANY
> PARTICULAR* physical thing
>

I agree.

 (although you can always point to *SOME *physical thing) and I believe
> it's a brute fact that consciousness is the way information feels when it
> is being processed intelligently.
>

I like this analogy, but I think it is incomplete. Can information (by
itself) feel? Can information (by itself) have meaning?

I see value in making a distinction between information and "the system to
be informed." I think the pair are necessary for there to be meaning, or
consciousness.

However there is nothing ephemeral about information, as far as we can tell
> the laws of physics are unitary, that is information can't be destroyed
> and the probability of all possible outcomes must add up to 100%. For a
> while Stephen Hawking thought that Black Holes destroyed information but he
> later changed his mind, Kip Thorne still thinks it may do so but he is in
> the minority.
>

I agree information can't be destroyed. But note that what I called
ephemeral was the conditional relation, which (at least usually) seems to
occur and last during a short time.

>
> *> All we need to do is link some action to a state of knowledge.*
>>
>
> At the most fundamental level that pretty much defines what a computer
> programmer does to make a living.
>

Yes.

> * > It shows the close relationship between consciousness and information,
>> where information is defined as "a difference that makes a difference",*
>>
>
> And the smallest difference that still makes a difference is the
> difference between one and zero, or on and off.
>

The bit is the simplest unit of information, but interestingly, there can
also be fractional bits. For example, if there's a 75% chance of some
event, like two coin tossings not both being heads, and I tell you that two
coin tossings were not both heads, then I have only
communicated -log2(0.75) ~= 0.415 bits of information to you.

> > *It shows a close relationship between consciousness and
>> computationalism,*
>>
>
> I strongly agree with that,  it makes no difference if the thing doing
> that computation is carbon-based and wet and squishy, or silicon-based and
> dry and hard.
>

Absolutely  ��

>  >  It is also supportive of functionalism and it's multiple
>> realizability, as there are many possibile physical arrangements that lead
>> to conditionals.
>
>
> YES!
>
> *> It's clear there neural networks firings is all about conditionals and
>> combining them in whether or not a neuron will fire and which other neurons
>> have fired binds up many conditional relations into one larger one. It
>> seems no intelligent (reactive, deliberative, contemplative, reflective,
>> etc.) process can be made that does not contain at least some conditionals.
>> As without them, there can be no responsiveness. This explains the
>> biological necessity to evolve conditionals and apply them in the guidance
>> of behavior. In other words, consciousness (states of knowledge) would be
>> strictly necessary for intelligence to evolve.*
>>
>
> I agree with all of that.
>

Happy to hear that. Thanks for all your feedback.

Jason

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
> <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>
> xex
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to everything-list+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0q60k%3DqoWMbNsAOVxG_qotkyV8TJhN8-vNLoMg7Pu48A%40mail.gmail.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0q60k%3DqoWMbNsAOVxG_qotkyV8TJhN8-vNLoMg7Pu48A%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
> .
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20230826/aba86a08/attachment.htm>