Earlier quoted context omitted.
> on real numbers
Only your pedantry cornered us here.
:)
Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
351–356 of 356 posts
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could I tell if there's consciousness in that simulated universe, when I can't tell whether other beings in this original universe are conscious?
If you replicate the universe, then the properties would hold from the reference and simulation. It shouldn't matter if we use information vs. whatever the reference implementation is using. We do this sort of thing when we simulate known systems, like a computer running in software. So if there is conscious beings in the universe, it'll be in the simulation. You hold that you're conscious, so then I'd hope you'd agr…
Induction is not proof :-) I'm also convinced, but primarily by Turing's argument ad politeness: "Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks".[1]
I haven't really found a compelling rational argument to fully reject solipsism.
Though I agree that looking for yourself in a perfect simulation is a clever hack. :-)
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=7pFHBAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT51&ots=...
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm get your point but I also think you've answered it yourself. You can give time and experience to a software mind by programming in that new layer...
How do you program a software mind to have had infancy, childhood, and a lifetime of social human interaction? I'm saying that's MUCH harder than simply making neural nets to perform specific duties.
Yeah it'll be harder, but I don't see anything in principle which makes it impossible. If you can simulate the growth and plasticity of the brain to enough precision, then you could probably simulate 20 years of development in a very short time.
Maybe I'm making a massively overly pedantic point. It's just that your post began with a claim that certain things "cannot be given" to an artificial mind, which sounded like you were proposing absolute limits to AI.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment. This is a giant leap to claim that they have a model and experience. You demonstrated that what they have is internal state, i.e. memory, which many machines have. That's what you proved, not that they experience anything.
I defined experience in such a way that only the existence of the model is required. And it's not hard to prove that they have a model of reality - simply ask them to predict what will happen. They don't even have to be right - any prediction about X means you have a model of X. It might be "everything is random" but it's still a model. You're free to define experience differently but usually it devolves into definin…
> Experience = event that changes the model of the world you have in your brain.
This is not what philosophers of mind are interested in. You're free to define experience differently, but you're not participating in the same conversation if you do.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You cannot experimentally decide if atoms experience anything, the fact that they do or don't doesn't change any prediction for how they behave over time. It's meaningless, like wondering if magic exists but is actively hiding from us. Paranoia is that way. This has so much potential to become a semantic death trap - but let me ask if you think even human experience could be experimentally tested? If you put me in…
> What does "non-experience" even mean? Indeed, that's why putting meaningless arbitrarily defined touchy-feely words in physics is a bad idea. But I'll try. Experience = event that changes the model of the world you have in your brain. We can verify it experimentally by for example: - testing if you associate a loud buzz with food before the experiment (either by looking at neurons that activate when you think of fo…
> Experience = event that changes the model of the world you have in your brain
So if I don't have a brain, then I can't have experiences? What if we find aliens out there that don't have brains? Or computers? Are they a-experiential by nature of not having brains, or is it something deeper?
> Indeed, that's why putting meaningless arbitrarily defined touchy-feely words in physics is a bad idea
We're not talking strictly about physics, though. I doubt most physicist professors would not let you bring up questions like these in physics class because they are the subject of an entire field of philosophy. And while there is relevant science to our debate, there's a lot of "soft" arguments outside of the scientific worldview that you should at least read and consider. See Jackson's knowledge argument, Block's Chinese Brain, or Nagel's "what it's like to be a bat" arguments. They "touch" on the uncomfortable ubiquity of things that we "feel" to be outside of a purely scientific view of the world.
> We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment.
This is a bit off kilter. Do people with memory or learning disorders, then, not have "experiences" because they don't learn? What about those who are deaf? You're essentializing consciousness into "ability to learn by hearing and rationally deduction". Computers can take audio input and learn from it with very primitive machine learning models - does that mean that the computer is having experiences akin to our own human experiences?
My advice is to give philosophy its due course! Read up on the touchy-feely stuff because it can be profoundly interesting.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment. This is a giant leap to claim that they have a model and experience. You demonstrated that what they have is internal state, i.e. memory, which many machines have. That's what you proved, not that they experience anything.
I defined experience in such a way that only the existence of the model is required. And it's not hard to prove that they have a model of reality - simply ask them to predict what will happen. They don't even have to be right - any prediction about X means you have a model of X. It might be "everything is random" but it's still a model. You're free to define experience differently but usually it devolves into definin…
> You're free to define experience differently but usually it devolves into defining unknown by unknown.
Many philosophers would suggest that we don't bother "defining" anything at all, strictly because of the tendency for things to devolve into a semantic death-trap. So instead, we just kind of take it for granted that everyone knows what an experience is, at a base level. For instance, it was an Experience to see Jimi Hendrix. However, I definitely have not had that particular experience. There are experiences I could have, such as the experience of going on a roller coaster, or going into space, and ones that I could not have, such as the experience that an anglerfish has when it eats. The question at hand is whether or not these experiences have anything to do with each other, whether there's a "Grand Unified Theory" of experience and consciousness that allows us to make mutual sense of these disparate experiences, or whether there's some limit to what things might constitute an experiment - e.g. the experience of being a rock thrown through a window.