Thanks, Jon, for that thoughtful post. Mostly I hope that others will comment on it.
I guess it comes down to two questions: Grant, for a moment, that knowing is a relation between two entities. Then, we can ask: What is the knowing relation? And, what sorts of competencies are required for an entity to engage in such a relation? And how many entities do you need before you have an instance of “knowing?”
Let’s take a dog as an entity and “time to take a walk” as another entity and the dog’s owner as a third entity. I would say that “the time to take a walk” is an entity they both know, although I don’t think they know it by the same description. As we talk, here, I am beginning to wonder if the minimal conditions for a ‘knowing” require co=ordination between two organisms.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:04 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
Nick,
I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.
My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,
though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.
For instance, can something have consciousness? That said, a
conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe
with consciousness language begins with granting consciousness
to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those
that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new things
with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).
This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem
of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.
`a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.
You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which
summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,
I am going to extend Lee's comment and ask that we consider
particular implementations or better particular embodiments.
Hopefully said without too much hubris, given enough time and
memory, I can compute anything that a Turing machine can compute.
The games `Magic the Gathering` and `Mine Craft` are Turing
complete. I would suspect that under some characterization, the
Mississippi river is Turing complete. It would be a real challenge
for me state what abstractions like `Mine Craft` experience, but
sometimes I can speak to my own experience. Oscar Hammerstein
mused about what Old Man River knows.
Naively, it seems to me that some kind of information processing,
though not sufficient, is necessary for experience and for a foundations
for consciousness. Whether the information processor needs to be
Turing complete is not immediately obvious to me, perhaps a finite-
state machine will do. Still, I do not think that a complete description of
consciousness (or whatever it means to experience) can exist without
speaking to how it is that a thing comes to sense its world.
For instance, in the heyday of analogue synthesizers, musicians
would slog these machines from city to city, altitude to altitude,
desert to rain-forested coast and these machines would notoriously
respond in kind. Their finicky capacitors would experience the
change and changes in micro-farads would ensue. What does an
analogue synthesizer know?
Cheers,
Jonathan Zingale
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