From: Brent Allsop (allsop@fc.hp.com)
Date: Thu Feb 24 2000 - 14:56:18 MST
John K Clark <jonkc@att.net> responded:
> If you insist on a low level definition of such a fundamental mental
> phenomenon then you must first explain what "means" means and give a
> non circular definition of "definition". Good luck, you'll need it.
You can't get off this easy! This is what I hate about the
way so many people approach this debate. So many people get lost in
the complexity of intelligence, the entirety of all possible
definitions..., and they think that somehow consciousness is hidden in
all this, and that perhaps we will somehow not be able to comprehend
it all ourselves. I'd argue that a non circular definition of
"definition" and of "meaning"... is possible, but it would be so
complex that our conscious abilities can't quite represent it all.
But as I see it, the important part of consciousness and their
phenomenal qualities has nothing to do with all this. Let's take, for
example, the pencil in a clear glass of water for discussion purposes.
I think even this is way to complicated for our purposes since the
trivial case is simply to say that a "red" sensations is defined to
represent 700 nm electromagnetic radiation and that its meaning comes
out when this is added to the diversity of all other colors and such.
But with the pencil in a clear glass of water example, at
least we can get some simple "spatial" meaning or definition which is
hopefully a bit easier to relate to and relative to what you seem to
be asserting.
The spatial meaning of my conscious percept is simply: The
pencil is bent. My conscious model of the pencil is a 3D replica that
means precisely what it spatially is. It "seems" to mean to me that I
can reach in and touch the pencil in the water at a certain location,
when in fact when my finger enters the water, my visual representation
of the finger, too, becomes incorrectly modeled. It *seems* to be in
a different location when in water. In order to actually touch the
part of the pencil in the water, I must compensate for my incorrect
conscious representations and move my finger accordingly.
This is all very simple, all sufficiently defined, and all has
clear spatial meaning. This is a very simple model. We have proved
this is possible because we can make robots with identical
representational problems and incorrect internal representations or
"seemings". Even though representations used by today's robots are
merely abstract while ours are "phenomenal". Also computer
representations have numerical 3D information but other than that, are
not in any related way 3D (why today's spatial robots are so inept?).
While I'm betting that our 3D representations are actual 3D in nature
within the neural structure of our primary visual cortex. (I've got a
paper describing some of this by Steve Lehar and myself if anyone is
interrested. <URL: http://www.frii.com/~allsop/pcave1.ps> Let me know
what you think of it if you read it!)
Are you saying there is something relevant to whether or not
qualia exist outside of such simple examples of spatial meaning and
definitions?
There isn't much complexity at all in what red is like. Red
is simply phenomenally Red, and can be used to mean whatever we want
it to mean, from 700 nm light, to stop, danger, warmth, love, my
favorite color or whatever. This debate is simply about what red is
like, not what it means or could be defined to be and how complex
intelligence uses such representations. Just as the nature of a
single bit, inside a robot's brain, doesn't have much to do with it's
intelligence, meaning, perception algorithms, and so on and so forth.
I believe it's a critical mistake to get unnecessary lost in the
complexity (and even worse to in a hand waving kind of way claim that
the missing parts of one's theories are some how hiding within such)
when thinking only about what, why, and how qualia are or even if we
really have them.
Brent Allsop
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:27:00 MST