Mind Emerging Out of Matter via "Complexity"

[Spock]

Thanks

You are most welcome. Having been a math prof for many years and listening to almost countless exams it is very easy to discern that someone is a bright guy or not. Even after a few minutes.

In the Emperor’s New Mind Penrose brings this up and points out that we could program the computer to give occasional “flawed” answers, so it’s “more human sounding”. With enough time and subroutines IBM could build a system that fools anyone yet was clearly no more conscious than your PC.

You see, I would agree with that, but how do you know it?

The true question is this: if, after a long process of such questioning (and you are the one who decides if the process was long enough) you are still uncertain if the “guy” is a human or a machine, what can you do? The fundamental question is: “how can we differentiate between a good emulation and the original”? I say we cannot. And if the difference cannot be measured, then there is no difference.

 

[inocente]

The principle is not a universal one however.
E.g., adding more love to a relationship will never make it down “downhill”.

Never said it was though david.

It’s not really even true for great artists - most of whom were incorrigible “fiddlers.” Yes, one can also ruin a work in this way - but it’s not the fiddling, per se, that’s the problem.

I like the use of “were” – no great artists anymore?

inocente, I have to agree with the others, this is just a bizarre stance, that purposely seeking ***less ***knowledge is good.

Please see next post to CII.

---

Just in case anyone thought I made it up, when a water colorist makes a hole in the paper, or a sculptor chisels the nose off, or an oil painter thinks “rats, ruined, never get that again” they might just go along with Robert Browning’s The Faultless Painter:

To paint a little thing like that you smeared / Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, / Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, / (I know his name, no matter)—so much less! / Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. / There burns a truer light of God in them, In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, / Heart, or whate’er else, than goes on to prompt / This low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand of mine. / Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know, / Reach many a time a heaven that’s shut to me, / Enter and take their place there sure enough, / Though they come back and cannot tell the world.

The phrase was also an inspiration for minimalism, but beyond that Spanish Baptists concede to Catholics’ obvious greater knowledge here.

 

[inocente]

I can certainly agree with that, as I have been guilty of it myself.

However, I don’t see the analogy to Christians reading Christian literature to improve themselves. Less is more? Only if the reason you are reading less is because the more you read the less you needed to read (the “more” has finally paid off by dramatically improving your spiritual life). If you are still reading more, it’s because you feel the need to improve has not been fulfilled … and you are still searching. Isn’t that one reason why many people come to Catholic Answers?

Well maybe this doesn’t happen in Catholic bookshops, but there are hundreds and hundreds of “self improvement” paperbacks by every man and his dog about how to interpret this verse or that, the meaning of a spiritual life, etc. etc. It’s just like all those contradictory paperbacks about how to succeed in management. Not only are many limp and confusing, they’re also confining, as in never listen to music or look at a painting unless it’s guaranteed 100% Christian. Quality doesn’t matter, branding is all that counts. But beyond all that there is a precept that continually trying to justify ourselves denies the role of Christ and that He loved us first (let’s not get into the faith vs. work business, hopefully you know what I mean).

So I’m with you up to a point, but maybe working in a soup kitchen will have more spiritual value than pulp faction.

On the other hand, there are a few books worth reading:

Such an operation often ends up by putting the faith itself in doubt, by raising the question of honesty of those who are interpreting it and of whether anything at all there is enduring. As far as theological views of this sort are concerned, finally, quite a number of people have the abiding impression that the church’s faith is like a jellyfish: no one can get a grip on it and it has no firm center. It is on the many half-hearted interpretations of the biblical Word that can be found everywhere that a sickly Christianity takes its stand – a Christianity that is no longer true to itself and that consequently cannot radiate encouragement and enthusiasm. It gives, instead, the impression of being an organization that keeps on talking although it has nothing else to say, because twisted words are not convincing and are only concerned to hide their emptiness. - Benedict, “In the Beginning…”

 

[inocente]

p-zombie, even using the philosopher’s short-hand, pretty good.

One has one’s moments.

The big problem with this “silicon brain” scenario is the you couldn’t “replace” in a one-to-one correspondence each neuron in the brain with a silicon device along with silver wires for the axons and synapses, it wouldn’t work the same way as a brain, the brain is much more complex than that.

How so?

IMHO a better thought experiment (I get this one from a book by Paul Davies, I don’t now if he originated it) would be to recreate biological neurons in the lab through nanotechnology and use these man-made artificial neurons to build a human brain from scratch. That would be interesting, what if you built this thing and transplanted it in a body, would this thing think exactly like a human being normally does?

Trouble is, it doesn’t remove the various x-factors in the way the silicon version does, which I’ll admit is tough on x-factorists.

Would it be a p-zombie or would it lack true intellect and understanding? I can’t say, I will say that the likely theological position (anyway, those theologians of the non-Spanish Baptist variety ) would be that it is missing something, a soul (unless of course there’s still a soul associated with the body this artificial brain was transplanted into, maybe we need to create an artificial body too ). The bottom line is that bizarre thought experiments like this are totally unanswerable until they are actually carried out and we see real world results.

I don’t think you’d find many theologians who would say that morally someone who looks and behaves human can be regarded as anything less than human.

Incidentally, we rarely talk about soul in Baptist circles (either in my old country or in Spain) and when we do it doesn’t carry any deconstructionist connotations, e.g. that the soul must conform to any formula derived from scripture. In this context, it is continuance after death, no less no more. Or rather, for Baptists, less is more.

 

[inocente]

Well, one thing I am expert on, software development-wise is pattern recognition, and in particular facial feature recognition and visual chunking algorithms that underlie them. It’s hard to overstate the human expertise in recognize and “reading” human faces. This is one reason why ‘pure 3D’ character in movies are a long way off as passable – we are just to good at smelling out fakes, and quickly, at that.

When morphing software first appeared someone thought it would be a good wheeze to take portrait photos of beautiful women and produce a composite to average out imperfections. And it was just plain – beyond classical beauty we are attracted by the imperfections. Then in life drawing, getting the essence of an attractive face so that it remains beautiful is really demanding.

Must be a fascinating job you have there.

 

[inocente]

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”
Erwin Schrodinger

Noticing you’re also in Spain, and remembering of course that there’s something in the air here that makes us courageous beyond words , would you like to walk where others fear to tread and have a go at post #54?

 

[Charlemagne_II]

inocente

Well maybe this doesn’t happen in Catholic bookshops, but there are hundreds and hundreds of “self improvement” paperbacks by every man and his dog about how to interpret this verse or that, the meaning of a spiritual life, etc. etc. It’s just like all those contradictory paperbacks about how to succeed in management. Not only are many limp and confusing, they’re also confining, as in never listen to music or look at a painting unless it’s guaranteed 100% Christian.

You may also have noticed that many an atheist has scads of atheist tracts in his private library. This signifies to me that he is still searching. A satisfied atheist doesn’t need to keep convincing himself that he needs to be an atheist.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

The Exodus

It seems to me perfectly reasonable to prove a negative. I can prove there is not cat existing in my mailbox, for instance.

It is theoretically possible to be able to prove a universal negative about anything in** this world**. It is theoretically possible to prove there is no Santa Claus nor are there pink unicorns.

But when talking about God, we talk about sometime other than this world. The rank materialist denies the possibility of anything like a God because God cannot be found in this world (since for him there is nothing other than this world). He cannot, of course, prove there is nothing other than this world, but that doesn’t stop him from believing in this world and this world only.

Those who think they have known God, and then in their 20s abandon the God they have “known,” often say they have done so because they recognized their religion was delusional. They are right. They never really knew God to begin with, or they would never have abandoned a Friend they truly loved with their heart rather than in their head.

 

[The_Exodus]

It is theoretically possible to be able to prove a universal negative about anything in** this world**. It is theoretically possible to prove there is no Santa Claus nor are there pink unicorns.

Well, one has obviously smuggled in the idea of materialism in such a definition of “this world.”

charlemagne:

But when talking about God, we talk about sometime other than this world. The rank materialist denies the possibility of anything like a God because God cannot be found in this world (since for him there is nothing other than this world). He cannot, of course, prove there is nothing other than this world, but that doesn’t stop him from believing in this world and this world only.

I realize this is what the materialist claims. My problem is that I find pure materialism self-refuting, since it would make all our thoughts “causal” instead of “logical” or “true.” It also eliminates the world of the spirit, which I find self-evidently true. And I think too that there is compelling evidence for a supreme cause existing outside space, time and matter.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

The Exodus
*
And I think too that there is compelling evidence for a supreme cause existing outside space, time and matter. *

Would this be compelling evidence for you, or should it be compelling evidence for everybody?

And what is it in a nutshell?

 

[lemondiesel]

Only read OP;

I think we need to be careful when we say “Mind” out of complexity. In a way this is true, because all Life has a “Mind” for survival and reproduction. All parts together, of all living species, plays a specific role, and without it, well they simply could not continue to survive. Even in the human body, all our cells, together, play a part in creating our minds.

The difference for us, is that we have emotions like compassion and forgiveness. Could a “computer” ever obtain such emotions? I say no, but who knows. We were once biological robots, “computers,” and now look at us!

 

[Charlemagne_II]

*The difference for us, is that we have emotions like compassion and forgiveness. Could a “computer” ever obtain such emotions? I say no, but who knows. We were once biological robots, “computers,” and now look at us! *

How would we program human imagination, human morals, human pleasures, human dilemmas, etc. into a computer?

And why would we want to or need to, when we already have them in ourselves?

 

[kildare]

Noticing you’re also in Spain, and remembering of course that there’s something in the air here that makes us courageous beyond words , would you like to walk where others fear to tread and have a go at post #54?

Slowly replacing neurons and synapses with artificial components?
OK -
I´ll stick my neck out and say it cant be done - that is you cannot perfectly replicate the brain, and my feeling is that is due to inherent non-linearity of each component that makes up teh whole. Each nueron is unique in that it might have variation of density, fluctuations of forces. Perhaps even at the aub-atomic level there are variations.
Then there is chaos theory. You know the famous butterfly effect. Well, it means that even allowing the tiniest of inacuracies in the initial conditions and you might get wildly different results.
Now if there are variations at the sub-atomic level, and if we need to iron those out two, then we are alread yundone, because we are already entering the Heizenberg Uncertainty Principal area.

So no I cant see it working at a materialist human-scientific level.
But for God nothing is impossible of course, and He will recreate our bodies.

 

[lemondiesel]

How would we program human imagination, human morals, human pleasures, human dilemmas, etc. into a computer?

Human imagination is a good one, you have me stumped at this time Charles.

The others might be much easier to do.

Human morals: program a set code to live by. I mean, this is how it is embedded in our brains isn’t it? Situation A has Reaction A.

Human pleasures: Image A will bring Pleasure A.

Human Dilemmas: Problem A can have Solutions A, B, C, etc with Outcomes A, B, C, etc. The computer can calculate these, and chose best choice. Then new dilemmas will be presented, with new solutions and outcomes.

And why would we want to or need to, when we already have them in ourselves

To eventually have Man vs Machines. I have dibs on being John Connor :whackadoo:

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

Slowly replacing neurons and synapses with artificial components?
OK -
I´ll stick my neck out and say it cant be done - that is you cannot perfectly replicate the brain, and my feeling is that is due to inherent non-linearity of each component that makes up teh whole. Each nueron is unique in that it might have variation of density, fluctuations of forces. Perhaps even at the aub-atomic level there are variations.
Then there is chaos theory. You know the famous butterfly effect. Well, it means that even allowing the tiniest of inacuracies in the initial conditions and you might get wildly different results.
Now if there are variations at the sub-atomic level, and if we need to iron those out two, then we are alread yundone, because we are already entering the Heizenberg Uncertainty Principal area.

So no I cant see it working at a materialist human-scientific level.
But for God nothing is impossible of course, and He will recreate our bodies.

I tried giving them that answer, though no where near as detailed as you just did, they refuse to accept it, such is the love for that goofy thought experiment, not even getting into the fact that it ends by asking if the silicon brain would be Turing machine, a theoretical device that reads marks on an infinite strip of tape

 

[Touchstone]

It seems to me perfectly reasonable to prove a negative. I can prove there is not cat existing in my mailbox, for instance.

I think you missed my response saying just this, way up thread. I said it was quite possible to show disprove the idea of a marble being in the milk carton in my hand. But that’s the example that puts dsproving God in stark relief. It highlights the futility of trying to disprove a supernatural natural god by contrast.

Well, you know quite a few people have claimed to have such evidence of the supernatural - witnessing miracles, etc.

Yes, but that’s really more a liability than an asset for you and your belief in God. If “quite a few making claims” has some epistemic weight all on its own, you are committed to chaos, a world of absurdities, constant and pervasive contradictions, epistemic nihilism. The problem with “there are claims” is that if you admit them naively, they prove WAY, WAY, WAY too much.

My point had to do with inference and science. Science will never be able to reach metaphysical certainty, because it always rests on induction of specific phenomena.

Yes, but that is not a problem at all, is it? What interest or use have you or I in requiring or even desiring metaphysical certainty?

Thus it can only gain a certain level of practical certainty – unlike metaphysics, which can reach speculative certainty with regard to the principle of contradiction, sufficient reason, etc, since these are all judgments made on being as such, not on a particular type of being, as science does.

Well, I think all that needs be said here that the object in this case is ‘speculative certainty’. The law of non-contradiction is a requirement for our minds to render the world around us somewhat intelligible. It’s not binding on cosmic metaphysics. Our minds adapt to the world we inhabit, rather than the world conforming to our minds. Speculative certainty or no, any metaphysical concepts we have are only as useful and ‘true’ as they fare against our experience of the world. Stomping one’s feet because the world is “too random” to be intelligible doesn’t change the nature of the universe. Our tools are only as valuable as they are practically useful, and that includes metaphysical conjecture.

I have difficulty understanding the relevance regarding how well a scientific worldview – e.g. that unicorns do not exist – performs. How does that have anything to do with the objective truth of the claim? How does that get us one iota closer to knowing if x exists or not?

It’s not hard to understand. It’s the same reason you trust your well being to a pilot and a Boeing airliner to safely move you across the content. It’s the same reason you ingest pills the doctor gives you when you are sick. It’s the same reason you swerve when an oncoming car moves into your lane – empirical performance is the performance we depend on, demonstrably, even the most mystical of us.

Science, unlike Catholicism, provides both a coherent model and semantics for “exists”, and a practical regime for applying the model in an objective way. You endorse this model every day, hundreds of times, and by comparison, the Catholic view, the view that makes it Catholic apart from secular/scientific (the part that is credulous about supernaturalism, etc.) can’t even manage coherent semantics about existence, never mind a practical means for applying them.

Just because we have never seen a black swan, does not mean they do not exist. Indeed, experience showed otherwise. Hence the constant “open-endedness” of science. It lacks certainty, and can offer only practical conclusions.

Yes, but lack of certainty and being evidence-driven are strengths, not weaknesses. Certainty is for monsters and fools.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

You see, I would agree with that, but how do you know it?

Well, here we depart. If you don’t have a way to distinguish, as you allow right here, you don’t have a basis to agree, do you? It’s not “clearly” unconscious, even (or especially) as a matter of brute force processing. That’s very much what may be at issue. Humans themselves are a challenge because of their “brute force” advantage over modern computing machinery; it’s so massively parallelized and asynchronous that no man-made machine at this point is practical as an analog. It would be unthinkably complex, not mention impractically huge, since our best small-scale manufacturing is no match for the fine grained nano-biology of the human brain.

Or, as one professor put it to me:* turn the “brute force” complaint against your own mind, son. If you really cannot tell, how can you resist the idea of your mind as a massively parallel “brute force” machine that is just so fast and pattern-honed in its responses that it has fooled you as its owner into superstitions?

*That’s a profound question, because the answer it reduces to is the worst one you could find: I just know. What we would look to Plantinga or Craig for encouragement in baptizing our intellectual sins by reassuring us that “knowledge of supernatural mind” is just a properly basic belief…

The true question is this: if, after a long process of such questioning (and you are the one who decides if the process was long enough) you are still uncertain if the “guy” is a human or a machine, what can you do? The fundamental question is: “how can we differentiate between a good emulation and the original”? I say we cannot. And if the difference cannot be measured, then there is no difference.

Thinking is as thinking does. Emotion is as emotion does. Love is as love does. There’s nothing inherently silicon or organic about that that we can identify. Rather these are descriptions of complex patterns and phenomena, the interrelation of complex systems.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

When morphing software first appeared someone thought it would be a good wheeze to take portrait photos of beautiful women and produce a composite to average out imperfections. And it was just plain – beyond classical beauty we are attracted by the imperfections. Then in life drawing, getting the essence of an attractive face so that it remains beautiful is really demanding.

Must be a fascinating job you have there.

I haven’t been on that project for a couple years now, and only support it with the occasional contribution to an update or specific feature requested by the customer. But just diving deep into facial recognition as a software discipline, two impressions are hard to avoid:

1. “Recognizing” is damn difficult, at least on the levels humans do in terms of quality and speed. One can really appreciate the staggering horsepower of the human brain by trotting out some very expensive and sophisticated computing arrays, only to watch the programs barely stumble and crawl along compared to human recognition.
2. Even in light of 1) above, one appreciates the degree of difficulty, but begins to see behind the “magic”, gets past some of the conceit we naturally maintain about ourselves. One of the best methods to build software that can do pattern recognition like humans is to understand and model (where possible) the way human brains do it. And it’s mechanical, the more you learn. Extremely sophisticated machinery that evolution has honed over eons, but machinery (and not just the light processing, but the abstractive processing that does the “chunking” and matching for patterns that enable recognition).

Visual recognition isn’t high level thinking or consciousness, but the infrastructure for it. But it’s an example of how staggering scale and complexity – differences in degree for processing between man and machine – are easily confused for magic, for something spooky, different in kind because we are bedazzled by the amazing scale and complexity.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

Slowly replacing neurons and synapses with artificial components?

This doesn’t seem a problem in principle, or even in practice. See the monkey with the neuroprosthetic arm here – a robotic arm wired right to the monkey’s brain. The brain is an electrical device, and the electronics are well within practical ranges and tolerances for our non-biological electronics.

Competing efforts in AI look to virtualize the human neuron mesh completely; all the neurons are “software neurons”, and what is emulated is topology and architecture of the neuron mesh. That’s got some good advantages (super flexible, easy to maintain and improve, cheap), but it’s terribly slow with current hardware/software.

There’s nothing about a “prosthetic neuron” that is problematic in terms of electronics or signaling in the human brain, so far as is known (and that’s a good bit, now).

OK -
I´ll stick my neck out and say it cant be done - that is you cannot perfectly replicate the brain, and my feeling is that is due to inherent non-linearity of each component that makes up teh whole.

If you could manufacture prosthetic neurons, you would simply clone (or properly replace) the very same non-linearity and parallelism of the human brain. Maybe you don’t understand what’s being suggested here: take a box with 100 billion prosthetic neurons (plastic and metal, etc. finely manufacture by IBM or Raytheon or some such), and replace bio-neurons one at a time. Now, you’d have to do that quick in practice, or the patient’s anesthesia will run out, and 100 billion(or more) prosthetic neurons is a lot to switch out, to be sure. But in principle, the replacement happens on a 1:1 basis, and when complete, the “prosthetic brain”, all copper, glass and plastic now, has EXACTLY THE SAME NETWORK ARCHITECTURE as the bio-brain it replaced.

It’s precisely non-linear and parallelized in the exact same way the bio-brain was.

Once that’s understood, it should make an important point apparent: the challenge of the brain is not tied up in its “organic-ness”, but in its complexity and network configuration. It’s the pattern and structure of the connections that is essential, not the medium of the neuron.

If that’s the case, then a “prosthetic brain” is really a challenge of producing sufficient patterns and structures, and is not contingent on being biological at all.

Each nueron is unique in that it might have variation of density, fluctuations of forces. Perhaps even at the aub-atomic level there are variations.

Yes, but that makes artificial intelligence all the more practical. Neurons vary in their tolerances and performance, from neuron to neuron. They aren’t perfect, or perfectly consistent from one to another. This is fortunate, as any prosthetic neuron would not be “perfect” either.

But it wouldn’t need to be. It would just need to operate in the wiggly tolerances of the biological neurons.

Then there is chaos theory. You know the famous butterfly effect. Well, it means that even allowing the tiniest of inacuracies in the initial conditions and you might get wildly different results.

Yes, but statistics! Probabilistically, these stabilize and become predictable at scale, just like everywhere else in physics. Bio-neurons and prosthetic neurons are at parity here, with the possible exception that prosthetic neurons are likely to superior in performance in a way something like a titanium prosthetic arm is stronger and lighter than the real thing. Perhaps prosthetic neurons would have be degraded a bit in their manufacturing to effect more realistic emulation of the bio-neurons.

Now if there are variations at the sub-atomic level, and if we need to iron those out two, then we are alread yundone, because we are already entering the Heizenberg Uncertainty Principal area.

Why? The Heisenberg Principle seems hard to place as relevant here, and even if that should be done, it applies to the prosthetic neuron as much as the bio-neuron.

So no I cant see it working at a materialist human-scientific level.
But for God nothing is impossible of course, and He will recreate our bodies.

I can’t see the problems, here. I don’t see that you’ve identified any. There may be problems, but they aren’t mentioned here.

-TS

 

[The_Exodus]

It highlights the futility of trying to disprove a supernatural natural god by contrast.

It seems easy to me to disprove the existence of God in principle. Just show how his existence would be absurd or contradictory, and there you go.

touchstone:

Yes, but that’s really more a liability than an asset for you and your belief in God. If “quite a few making claims” has some epistemic weight all on its own, you are committed to chaos, a world of absurdities, constant and pervasive contradictions, epistemic nihilism. The problem with “there are claims” is that if you admit them naively, they prove WAY, WAY, WAY too much.

I strongly disagree. In fact, I have no idea how what you say follows at all.

It also seems contradictory to me to maintain that the universe came “from” nothing, and yet think that some claiming to have experienced the supernatural – that “beyond” nature, in the form of miracles, things inexplicable by science (which there is, contrary to any materialist worlview, an enormous amount of data supporting if one will only look for it), etc – is commiting one to “chaos.”

Everything can pop into being from nothing without any explanation or intelligible reason, but if someone claims to have witnessed a miracle, that’s a no-no. What…?

Also, are you aware that such an emotive/rhetorical use of “way” would seem to tell against your subconscious presuppositions, from a psychological point of view? At any rate, such language means nothing to me.

touchstone:

Yes, but that is not a problem at all, is it? What interest or use have you or I in requiring or even desiring metaphysical certainty?

What interests me precisely is certainty. I don’t know about you, but I would rest uneasy at night if I supposed the non-existence of God could be arrived at with actual certainty, particularly considering the potential gain and loss if he did exist.

touchstone:

The law of non-contradiction is a requirement for our minds to render the world around us somewhat intelligible.

So you are a Kantian?

touchstone:

It’s not binding on cosmic metaphysics.

I wonder how you could ever justify such a claim…

I would be delighted for you to show me. Until then, it is a naked assertion to me.

touchstone:

It’s not hard to understand. It’s the same reason you trust your well being to a pilot and a Boeing airliner to safely move you across the content.

I don’t think you understand my point, which leads you to constant repetition.

The certainty I am speaking of is on a different plane, a different sphere, from whatever practical, scientific, conjectural certainty you posit on pragmatic grounds, etc.

touchstone:

You endorse this model every day, hundreds of times, and by comparison, the Catholic view…

Of course I do. That is not the issue here at all. In fact, I think prudence and practicality a virtue, as did the Scholastics.

You simply fail to understand the pre-eminence of metaphysical claims, and instead keep claiming that “results” equal truth, which is simply fallacious.

You’ve yet to show how it is logical to conclude that black swans do not exist, simply because you’ve never seen one.

touchstone:

Yes, but lack of certainty and being evidence-driven are strengths, not weaknesses. Certainty is for monsters and fools.

…he says in all manner of conviction and certainty.

You remind me of Wittgenstein, who said we ought to be “silent” about such metaphysical questions…but at the same time he wrote tomes on them, spent his life writing and being “unsilent” about them.

Telling.