[Inspiron]

(Original post by wanderer)
Well, the response is basically Moorean. It seems to me more absurd to reject qualia than to reject any non-qualitative understanding of the world. And I really have no idea how you can possibly maintain that position. You know fine well what qualia are. You know them better than you know anything else, if you can even know anything else.

What are they?

[wanderer]

(Original post by Inspiron)
What are they?

Experiences.

[Inspiron]

Then I don't deny they exist. Everyone has experiences. How does just "experiences" harm the functionalist (specifically Teleofunctionalist) account of mind?

[Shaun39]

(Original post by wanderer)
Creating a simulated world with the same level of complexity as this one is, quite obviously, impossible in this universe. You might be able to create a fairly small one, if you had a really big computer. Using black holes or something.

The simulated world wouldn't need anywhere near the internal complexity or scale that we perceive ours to have for it to appear to be equally complex and of equal scale to its inhabitants. The computer only has to generate simulated sensual inputs for that which is observed by inhabitants - anything in the simulated world that isn't observed really doesn't exist - processing power isn't wasted simulating the areas of the world that people aren't watching. That drastically cuts down the processing power required - you need enough to simulate the minds of all the inhabitants whatever number of them there are, and to simulate only those events and the environment which they directly experience.

To meet a Turing test for a world - that it appears as real as our own - surely a simulation requires nothing more than a large (but by no means infinite or unachievably large, given a century or two of advancement) amount of processing power, and the kind of programming you'd use to simulate the human mind itself. What the artificial human minds are incapable of perceiving, the artificial world do not need to be capable of simulation.

If humanity survives long enough to become capable of creating such advanced simulations which appear to their inhabitants to be as complex as our own world; if we find some motive to create these worlds, and proceed to do so, then at that point in time, it will become statistically likely that we are in such a simulation ourselves. That's a lot of ifs and maybes, but a possibility i find likely enough to occur at some time in the future to be of interest. It's not quite like bubbles in the zoo: if we know that every flesh-and-blood bubbles has assembled 5 perceptibly identical robotic monkeys, then the chance that any individual bubbles is a flesh-and-blood monkey is only 1/6. Similarly, if it happens, once we've constructed 5 or 10 simulated worlds perceptibly identical to our own, then the chances that ours is "real" is 1/6 or 1/11.

Of course you're right Inspiron, the "Gods" would not be omniscient in the exact sense, but they would be capable of knowing absolutely anything about the simulation that they want to know, within the context of first knowing what they want to know, and within the limits of the volume of information that they can handle.

I suppose whether we're real or in a simulation is of little significance - the only distinction would be that one would appear to be governed by the yet undiscovered laws of physics and have an omnipotent deity with the power to interfere if it so choses in defiance of these laws, whereas the other, unless you are religious, would be always appear to be governed purely by the yet undiscovered laws of physics, with no deity intervention possible (again, unless you are religious). Perhaps it has some significance as to how humans identify themselves however?

[wanderer]

(Original post by Inspiron)
Then I don't deny they exist. Everyone has experiences. How does just "experiences" harm the functionalist (specifically Teleofunctionalist) account of mind?

Because it's perfectly conceivable that I could have different experiences but abstract the exact same structural model (the same 'physical world').

[Iago]

Also, we have to remember that a function is all about us mapping and organising our experience of the world in certain way. It seems odd - even absurd - that experience itself should be a function. I almost want to say it's meaningless.

I dunno. I'm torn here because I see the immense contribution of the functionalist approach - yeah, it is a goddamn useful way of looking at the mind and mental states. But it doesn't solve the hard problem of consciousness, it's just another byproduct of it. The hard problem of consciousness does not have a solution, save for the solution of finding a way for it to never arise (untangling the problem, seeing that there is no need for a problem).

I'm not entirely sure how to go about doing this. But 'mind' is a more complex concept than most phil. of mind thinkers seem to give it credit for (the love of generalisations is particularly a vice of analytic philosophy). I have to keep reminding myself that its not strange for very different philosophical approaches to the mind to seem to simultaneously have merit. The usage of mental concepts in our language are obviously massively complex and varied. We're not discussing a simple or whole here. The functionalist account certainly gives account of how mental concepts work, at least in part. That it fails to tackle the hard problem of consciousness seems less a failing and more just a case of its proponents not even being able to see the problem - because, perhaps unbenowst to them, it's not really what they're interested in. Functionalism does what it sets out to do and just sails right by the hard problem of consciousness. That 'mind' is taken in too holistic a manner can be seen in the way many philosophers of mind seem to be talking straight past each other (Dennett vs. Searle + Chalmers springs to mind - anyone ever seen their shouting matches?)

[The Boosh]

"johnny 5" was alive, so put that in your philosophy pipes and smoke it!

i watched short circuit the other day, cracking film, absolutely cracking.

[wanderer]

(Original post by Iago)
Also, we have to remember that a function is all about us mapping and organising our experience of the world in certain way. It seems odd - even absurd - that experience itself should be a function. I almost want to say it's meaningless.

I dunno. I'm torn here because I see the immense contribution of the functionalist approach - yeah, it is a goddamn useful way of looking at the mind and mental states. But it doesn't solve the hard problem of consciousness, it's just another byproduct of it. The hard problem of consciousness does not have a solution, save for the solution of finding a way for it to never arise (untangling the problem, seeing that there is no need for a problem).

I'm not entirely sure how to go about doing this. But 'mind' is a more complex concept than most phil. of mind thinkers seem to give it credit for (the love of generalisations is particularly a vice of analytic philosophy). I have to keep reminding myself that its not strange for very different philosophical approaches to the mind to seem to simultaneously have merit. The usage of mental concepts in our language are obviously massively complex and varied. We're not discussing a simple or whole here. The functionalist account certainly gives account of how mental concepts work, at least in part. That it fails to tackle the hard problem of consciousness seems less a failing and more just a case of its proponents not even being able to see the problem - because, perhaps unbenowst to them, it's not really what they're interested in. Functionalism does what it sets out to do and just sails right by the hard problem of consciousness. That 'mind' is taken in too holistic a manner can be seen in the way many philosophers of mind seem to be talking straight past each other (Dennett vs. Searle + Chalmers springs to mind - anyone ever seen their shouting matches?)

especially to the first paragraph.

I'm not sure that it makes sense to raise the hard problem of consciousness, because it seems to push beyond the limits in which asking for explanations makes sense. That said, the problem of other minds does seem to make sense, and it's related. I'm tempted to say that the concept of other minds is too muddled to make sense itself, but it seems callous to dismiss such an intuitive idea.

[Inspiron]

(Original post by Shaun39)
The simulated world wouldn't need anywhere near the internal complexity or scale that we perceive ours to have for it to appear to be equally complex and of equal scale to its inhabitants. The computer only has to generate simulated sensual inputs for that which is observed by inhabitants - anything in the simulated world that isn't observed really doesn't exist - processing power isn't wasted simulating the areas of the world that people aren't watching. That drastically cuts down the processing power required - you need enough to simulate the minds of all the inhabitants whatever number of them there are, and to simulate only those events and the environment which they directly experience.

Even if the world isn't a permanentely projective world it doesn't mean that the processing power required to simulate it is anywhere near achievable. Imagine, for example, that we have created a human-like intelligence. In fact, this thought doesn't even need that, imagine taking an actual human guinea pig and plugging them in the Matrixesque world of your computer program.

Now, you can send them neural messages telling them that they're lying on a beach blindfolded - and for some bizzare reason unable to move anything but their right index finger. Well, other than the possible blind panic that may result from this, we have to think - any simulation has got to realistically create exactly what it would feel like for the human/turing intelligence to move their finger/turing finger in the sand in any way they please. That in itself is beyond computing power today, because the combinatorial problem of both the sand, how it feels, how it shifts, how it reacts with the possibility of choice of the individual - curling finger, rolling finger, rubbing finger is just too many.

So now we've established that we can't simulate - realistically - a blind, mute, deaf, mostly immobile human lying on a beach, I hope you see how unrealistic it is to assume that such a world is even plausible.

(Original post by Iago)
Also, we have to remember that a function is all about us mapping and organising our experience of the world in certain way. It seems odd - even absurd - that experience itself should be a function. I almost want to say it's meaningless.

I think this depends - like you sort of say - on where your metaphysical sympathies lie. If you are commited to Functionalism, you are more likely to take a you've-made-your-bed-now-lie-in-it approach. I'm not a fully fledged functionalist, though I do have extreme sympathies with the Teleofunctionalist view. It just seems to me that consciousness is something that can be explained, it seems to me result from the fact that - as I see it, to combine a saying with a spoonerism - the soul is greater than the hum of its parts. In the sense that, (soul meaning consciousness here obviously) how all the parts 'hum' together could well have as a byproduct this thing that we call consciousness.

[wanderer]

A byproduct? Epiphenomenalism rearing it's head?

[Iago]

Inspiron, could you give a brief overview of what you mean by teleofunctionalism? I have no idea myself and can't find much that's any good online.

[TheEntertainer]

All I can say is that A.I. is certainly better than my own intelligence...

And I honestly wouldn't mind if it was efficiently installed into one of these...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Actroid-DER_01.jpg

[Inspiron]

(Original post by Iago)
Inspiron, could you give a brief overview of what you mean by teleofunctionalism? I have no idea myself and can't find much that's any good online.

Teleofunctionalism, as defined by (the man in these sorts of occasions) Simon Blackburn is: "The variety of functionalism that augments it with reference to teleology: we can think of mental states not only in terms of their actual causal relationships but also in terms of what part in an overall causal structure they are 'supposed' to play, where the 'supposed' is given by the adaptive purpose they serve."

Like I say, i'm not 100% committed to this view of functionalism. But it does seem to be to be the most adept theory of mind. My own adaptations are of a sort of naturalistic yet Hofstatderian tint: that all the parts working together make up more than the parts working alone. All that there is is the brain, but the brain itself cannot be understood in totally reduced terms. Just like Hofstatder's Ant Colony, which can hold conversations even though the individual ants are - on their own - barely more than drones, I see neurons as ants, and consciousness as the colony.

[wanderer]

(Original post by Inspiron)
Teleofunctionalism, as defined by (the man in these sorts of occasions) Simon Blackburn is: "The variety of functionalism that augments it with reference to teleology: we can think of mental states not only in terms of their actual causal relationships but also in terms of what part in an overall causal structure they are 'supposed' to play, where the 'supposed' is given by the adaptive purpose they serve."

'The adaptive purpose they serve' is a little tricky to pin down, surely? I mean, most mental states aren't likely to have an evolutionary purpose - it's the general architecture and some specific trends within it that were biological adaptations, but a lot of mental functioning is highly context dependent, and the context most of our mental states occur in has changed massively since our brains arrived at their current state.

[Inspiron]

(Original post by wanderer)
'The adaptive purpose they serve' is a little tricky to pin down, surely? I mean, most mental states aren't likely to have an evolutionary purpose - it's the general architecture and some specific trends within it that were biological adaptations, but a lot of mental functioning is highly context dependent, and the context most of our mental states occur in has changed massively since our brains arrived at their current state.

Philosophy of Mind is hardly the most precise, gloriously detailed arena. And I will concede to you, for once at least, that yes - this is a little heard to pin down. But then, I see it as no harder to pin down than the troubles with qualia, and while you may doubt mental states have an evolutionary purpose (which i am unsure on) it seems to me that the architecture of the Brain could well fit into this kind of picture. There have been several works recently on Neural Darwinism, none which I have had the time to read alas, but that do suggest the Brain commits itself to far more neurons than it needs when a child is developing and "axes" the ones that do not get used so much as the child reached adulthood. The correlation between that activity in the Brain and say; development of personality seems pretty obvious. Moreover, I personally see that the differing aspects in all of us (from our personalities to our attitudes) can probably be accounted for by the differences in our Brain, an organ so complex that investigation at the moment probably would not be able to catalogue all the differences between Brain architecture between you and me (that is not to say, of course, that you and me are polarly different!)

As of such, mental states - which are functional states in some form or other (my personal philosophy of mind story is not sure what mental states are exactly, other than that they are physical, and are certainly identifiable in terms of their functional aspects - but I suspect this attitude considering I have thought very little about it and am, after all, only a small 2nd Year Undergraduate, will be very difficult to defend) can be characterised in this Neural Darwinistic picture simply by suggesting that functionalism - which usually defines mental states in terms of a triplet of relations - is the right project as what causes mental states is in fact the parts of the brain working together in some way or other, in such a way as in order to understand how this is happening takes a much bigger picture view than reduction to the individual neurons themselves, though ultimately they form the building blocks of what admittedly seems like an unexplainable Pyramid or Chateau of mind.

[nikk]

I think we will develop machines which behave very intelligently, but that under the surface are still just machines. At least in the near future.

[bordercollies10]

First of all, you have to define the term "intellegence". The notion of intellegence is predicated by the ability to "pick out". This therefore requires cognition. The Chinese room experiment is not unlike that of Google Translate. Suppose you had a rule book that stated how to translate from English to Chinese and some spare time. You could use those resources to translate a novel without learning anything new. That is how Google translate works! Computers can also simulate, but never feel, emotion. Is emotion limited to living, reproductive things as it serves a purpose? From that we can discover room for an ontological theory (which would be a mere comment on something Kant has already put to paper) but lets not eschew the discussion of AI! Software will always be a finite specification of what a computer will do. Algorithms - such as the sorting and/or searching algorithms - are used as abstract steps in order to achieve an end result. A truly intellegent computer would predicate that the programmer had an algorithmic concept of the nature of cognition...