X-Message-Number: 8335
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 12:09:23 -0700
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Reducing Consciousness

Mike Perry writes,

>Stephen Bogner, #8324, has, I think, come up with some illuminating 
>ideas about consciousness, by which I do not mean I think his 
>formalism is perfect--but it certainly has merits. 
>[...] I think the issue of feeling can also be 
>approached in a similar way, i.e. reductionistically. We should be 
>able to come up with conditions under which a system could be said to 
>exhibit "feeling" much as Mr. Bogner has developed for consciousness.

We each have our own philosophical preferences, of course, and we've 
seen heated defences of various of these here, but it seems impossible
that philosophical explication alone, no matter that it is as carefully
detailed as Mr Bogner's post, will resolve this matter. 

I suspect that Charles Platt is correct to ridicule the whole thread;
if we can expect no resolution without philosophical commensuration, and
we can expect no philosophical commensuration, then we're scuppered before
we begin. Let future cryonet posters on the subject of identity/consciousness 
preface their comments by an explanation of their philosophical assumptions;
then, if nothing else, we may avoid the cross-purposes that have featured
so prominently up to now.

This said, while Mr Bogner's formalism didn't do a lot for me, I felt that 
his basic ideas were sound; if we're to accept that consciousness is 
reducible, then we may indeed observe it, as a quantum, in Church-Turing
equivalent devices. When it comes to "feeling", the gimmick would lay 
in that the world, as perceived by such consciousness, is already simulated; 
it doesn't exactly represent whatever is actually going on, but only our 
gross measurements, abstract reasoning, and approximate recollection. 
Within such simulations, feelings and other qualia may be represented by 
a form equivalent to the representation of sense-data; after all, within 
a simulation, there is nothing essentially concrete about any artifact 
except for its predictive power with respect to other parts of the simulation.

In this view there remains no mystery in feelings. Instead, the mystery lays 
in the flow of sense-data into "the world". When we ascribe any properties 
to the source of this data, whether those properties assume the commonly 
accepted Western form of a Cartesian philosophy, the degenerate form
(solipsism), or any of the other "two and seventy jarring sects", we
have no obvious empirical standard by which to judge the ascription. 
Even the agnostic/taoist tenet that suggests there can be no such 
standard is an expression of faith - of a kind. 

Such a view does present one great advantage over the others that
have been expressed; within it, the intention of constructing artificial
intelligences is quite well-founded. Whether or not such constructions
succeed according within one or another philosophical context is less
important, I feel, than whether or not these contructions promulgate
and endure.

Peter Merel.

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