X-Message-Number: 8066
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 1997 10:11:40 -0700
From: Tim Freeman <>
Subject: Re: Surprise and the Subconscious

>   Development of a multi-agent view of consciousness has also in
>the past been badly hampered by the fact that the mind seems to
>be equipped with a prevarication or self-justification module (or
>Munchausen Circuit, if you will) which causes the "speaking
>consciousness" to quite often fabricate reasons for behavior. 

Great name for the phenomenon.  Thanks.

>Moreover, I propose that one reason Searle's "Chinese Room" seems
>to be intrinsically incapable of consciousness to some imaginers,
>is that the Chinese Room is intrinsically and by definition
>incapable of surprising us.  You can, after all, look up and
>predict anything it does, in a big book of rules.  For that
>reason, it doesn't pass the Descartes Corollary test (the
>"Surprise Test"), and neither do any computers which run with
>discrete and predictable binary programs.  

I am surprised by computers all the time, because I don't really have
the mental capacity to read and memorize all of the source code and
then forecast their behavior.  This is also a flaw with the Chinese
Room argument.

>   Here, I don't mean "predictable" in terms of the Turing
>halting problem, I mean predicable from the view of repeatability
>of behavior.

I spend lots of time hunting down intermittent bugs in programs.
Constructing software or hardware with non-repeatable behavior is all
too easy to do.  For instance, one might think that the duplicator and
test-room would be easy to make for a computer -- just buy two
identical computers at the store and run the same software.  This
doesn't work for some programs, because you can't really control the
rotational positions of the disks.  This influences timing, and then
once you have behavior that is sensitive to timing, it influences
gross behavior.  So it's easy to get nonpredictablity in practice,
even with systems that are designed to be predictable.  Therefore I
don't care much about determinism, since even when it is supposed to
be there it often isn't, and when it is there I am still surprised
because I lack the cognitive capacity to make valid predictions. 
--
Tim Freeman       
            http://www.infoscreen.com/resume.html
Web-centered Java and Perl programming in Silicon Valley or offsite

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