--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@...> wrote:

> --- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:

>
> > But the issue that I am addressing and have always been addressing,
> > even when asking your for explication of your reason for thinking
> > AI is on the wrong track, is not what cognitive agents do but how
> > they come to be in a world chock full of apparently inanimate things.

>
> But you only see that as a puzzle because of how you are looking at it.
> Even the most primitive biological organism has more intentionality than
> a computer will ever have.

That is an assumption and as long as you begin with it then it stands to reason that the approach I am suggesting makes sense seems to make no sense to you. The issue is what is it about intentionality or any of the other features of consciousness that make them what they are. We can examine what it means to be intentional (etc.) for our part, to think ABOUT things. We can say that it doesn't look like that feature is present, say, in certain other creatures, or is present in the way it is with us, etc. But then one can say well there is still something in another creature that is like that feature in me, but my computer doesn't have it. But if what it is is something computers COULD have if they could be brought to do the same things the other creatures are doing, or we are doing, then why shouldn't they have it?

You've said homeostasis is at the bottom of it and that no computer has homeostasis, and that simply producing a virtual homeostatic state in a computer won't suffice to do the same thing as really having it. But you haven't shown or described just what it is about homeostasis that gets us to intentionality though you've said homeostasis drives pragmatic choosing drives perception drives the features we call "being conscious" -- or something to this effect -- albeit without showing why, if we could produce these features another way, we couldn't also get consciousness AND you haven't shown the mechanics of this transmission of causes actually produces those features.

Every time I ask you to answer these questions you tell me I am misunderstanding you or talking about something else. Now it may be I am misunderstanding you. But if I am talking about something else it's because you are talking about something different than I am asking about.

My question is and remains how does consciousness come to be in the world and, since brains appear to be the requisite physical entity for consciousness to occur, what do they do that makes it happen and could what they do be done by something else (e.g., computers). To this your answer is finally "Even the most primitive biological organism has more intentionality than a computer will ever have".

But isn't this basically an assertion (perhaps even an assertion of faith) because, absent an understanding of the mechanism that makes consciousness happen (which is what I keep asking about), we have no idea whether your statement is actually true?

> Sure, an amoeba or a plant is not conscious.
> But it is still very different from computers.
>

Some would dispute that. I am agnostic on the subject of it being different in a relevant way myself.

>
> You are trying to look at every thing as mechanism.

Well it's obvious that the brain is a physical thing and the brain does something (or lots of things) and that some of what the brain does manifests as being conscious in the entity in which the brain is situated. The options, in our usual categories of thought are: the brain merely correlates with the occurrence of consciousness, albeit closely (consciousness and brains somehow co-exist), or the one causes the other.

There is no reason to think the consciousness conjures or imagines the brain into existence but there is reason, based on what we generally believe we know of the world, to think the brain brings consciousness into existence.

Now if you want to call that assuming a mechanism I am certainly in agreement (and often use the word "mechanism" myself for this relation). However, it is possible, given how we use "mechanism" in ordinary language (i.e., to refer to mindless physical interactions), to get a wrong picture here, i.e., to think only of mechanical contrivances in some Rubegoldbergian picture of things or just to think of a dumb automobile engine for instance. Of course, by "mechanism" I mean any physical interactions from chemistry to the atomic and sub-atomic behaviors of particles in physics. On THAT picture everything that happens in the universe has a physical explanation.

The only question is whether we should include the occurrence of consciousness in that "everything" or whether we must, by excluding it, expand our idea of what makes up the universe.

>And in a way, the
> greater puzzle is that you (and others) would do that. As best I can
> tell, the only actual mechanisms that exist are human artifacts. So this
> whole idea of trying to reduce everything to mechanism seems foolish.
>

Ah, then you can see, perhaps, why I find your use of "mechanism" problematic given what I have just said above. I don't mean by the term what you apparently mean by it, namely nothing but "human artifacts"!

>
>
> > Yes, but the issue at hand is how do we get these kinds of sentient
> > agents, that is entities with a subjective point of view, entities
> > that experience. It's not what THEY do but how they come to be that
> > AI, and cognitive science generally, addresses.
>
>
> Yet it seems to me that AI and most of cognitive science make little
> effort to address that question. What I more commonly see is people
> trying to explain away that question, and to convince themselves that it
> is all mechanism.

If your idea of "mechanism" is as constrained as you have described it above, "human artifacts" only, then it would not be surprising that you would make this mistake. But biological functioning is as mechanical (on my broader view of "mechanism") as anything else, even if they aren't manmade!

> But, if you look around the world, the only
> mechanisms are our own created artifacts, so it seems foolish to try to
> explain everything as mechanism.
>
>

This looks like a word meaning problem to me. No one I know who claims that brains do something that produces consciousness thinks that they are talking about things like automobile engines and the like. Brains are biological machines, not manmade, with a different genesis which could well include very different underlying principles of operation. Still brains can work or fail to work and when they work they are doing things in the world. Now it's my turn to invoke the word "magic" and say there is nothing magical about brains on such a view. They are biological entities and, insofar as they do some things and not other things, they are machines. They just aren't manmade artifactual machines. They are a good deal more complex and they are naturally occurring and they operate in ways we have yet to understand.

>
> > That is, I asked you to explain what you once told me on another
> > list, that the key to understanding how minds come to be (not
> > came to be as in evolutionarily history!) is in understandinding
> > the homeostasis of living systems (which, presumably, computers
> > don't have).
>
>
> It seems that I cannot explain it. You do not recognize the existence
> of the kind of problem that homeostasis can solve, and I have been
> singularly unsuccessful in my attempts to introduce you to those
> problems.
>
>

That may be. While I will disagree with your statement that I don't recognize the existence of the kind of problem you say homeostasis can solve (I have never given any evidence here or anywhere of denying that living organisms are closed systems engaged in various self-sustaining functions including defense from external incursion, ingestion of fuel to maintain internal equilibrium and self propagation), I do think that we are addressing different questions.

I am interested in how minds are brought into existence, each time one is, and what that says about what minds are, while you seem to be more interested in the evolutionary progression that gets certain kinds of systems to the stage where they develop the consciousness we associate with having a mind.

I don't deny the latter question or claim disinterest in it. I just want to note that it isn't the question I have been addressing. Insofar as you once said that AI is wrong because it fails to take homeostasis into account, you need to show how taking homeostasis into account leads to a different explanation of what consciousness is and how it is brought about in the world than the one AI, and theses that support it, provides.

But insofar as you talk about something else instead, you aren't doing much to support your criticisms of AI.

Now AI may well be the wrong way to go. But you told me you had a reason why it was wrong and that the reason lay in homeostasis. So you need to say how homeostasis brings consciousness about (not in terms of evolutionary history but in terms of each individual conscious entity during the period of that entity's own existence)!

>
> > At least Dennett has an account, whether one chooses to say it can't
> > work because it is premised on the abstraction of computational
> > programming or not.
>
>
> Whether or not it is based on particular abstractions is not what
> matters. The learning method proposed for AI is wholly inadequate to
> account for human learning.
>
>
> Regards,
> Neil
>
>
> =========================================

You could be right about AI being wrong in terms of the learning method. Hawkins makes the same claim (though you also reject Hawkins). But at least Hawkins offers an alternative (pattern matching, retention and recapitulation via a relatively simple algorithm in a complex array of cells in the brain in lieu of an agglomeration of massively complex algorithms as AI proponents propose). Thus far all you have said is that the homeostasis of closed systems (of which living systems are the obvious, if not necessarily the exclusive, example) leads to pragmatic choosing which leads to perception (as the imposition of pre-existing forms on raw sensation) and this somehow leads to the features we associate with being conscious.

As you know, I have been intrigued by your claim since you first broached it and all my efforts in our ongoing discussions have been directed at getting from you the mechanical specifics (how each of the things you've cited works to bring about the next thing in the chain and how this finally leads to the occurrence of minds). But you seem to want to disregard mechanical explanations entirely on the grounds that this implies something artifactual made by humans.

THAT picture seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding of how I am using the term "mechanical". Now if you insist that, because of such a picture, NO mechanical explanation can be given, what is finally left?

Are you saying that consciousness just happens when brains reach a certain point of development? Is it your contention that consciousness is a new thing brought into the universe in some other-than-mechanical way? Or that it is always here, somehow riding along side the physical parts of the universe though, perhaps, it isn't always recognized as being here?

If you have no mechanism to give us to explain how minds occur in brains, how brains produce consciousness, then it seems to me you are finally resting your case on a dualist presumption. Now I know "dualism" is sometimes taken as a dirty word. I assure you I don't mean it like that. I just think that one should be clear about where one stands. If nothing in the physical universe suffices to make consciousness, then consciousness is a separate thing following its own trajectory in which case lots of things, including ghosts in machines, would seem to be possible. Is that where you want to go?

SWM

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--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "jrstern" <jrstern@...> wrote:

> --- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@> wrote:
> >
> > > But the issue that I am addressing and have always been
> > > addressing, even when asking your for explication of your
> > > reason for thinking AI is on the wrong track, is not what
> > > cognitive agents do but how they come to be in a world chock
> > > full of apparently inanimate things.
>
> Is this a special case?
>
> Do you worry about how cats come to be in a world chock full of non-cats? Hot things in a world chock full of cold things?
>

I said this, Josh, not Neil (in case you are confusing the two of us in your question above). My issue, in saying it, was not to wonder how there could be minds in the world at all but to wonder how minds happen in the world, given the evident physical and, therefore, apparently inanimate, nature of this world in which minds occur?

That is, my "how" was not a metaphysical "how" (how can things come to be, whether particular things or things in general) but a scientific one, i.e., what is it about some physical things that produces the subjectness of minds that have manifestly come to be in this world?

The rest of what you wrote (which followed the above) seems to be directed to Neil's own words so I won't intrude in that discussion. I just wanted to make sure that 1) if you WERE responding to me, I didn't ignore it or 2) if you thought this was something Neil had said you were not unfairly tarring him with a brush better meant for me.

SWM

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--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:
>
> > Is this a special case?
> >
> > Do you worry about how cats come to be in a world chock full of non-cats? Hot things in a world chock full of cold things?
>
> I said this, Josh, not Neil (in case you are confusing the two of us in your question above). My issue, in saying it, was not to wonder how there could be minds in the world at all but to wonder how minds happen in the world, given the evident physical and, therefore, apparently inanimate, nature of this world in which minds occur?

Yes, Stuart, I'm clear it was you saying this.

But I wanted to take issue with it, and Neil had responded without
taking issue with it, so I responded to both separately.

> That is, my "how" was not a metaphysical "how" (how can things come to be, whether particular things or things in general) but a scientific one, i.e., what is it about some physical things that produces the subjectness of minds that have manifestly come to be in this world?

But the question is, whether there are ANY different issues
regarding mind, that do not also concern any mereological or
phenomenal entities.

This is a methodological question Fodor spend extensive time
on, what questions of "mind" are really questions of scientific
or philosophical methods more generally? Because there does seem
to be a tendency to treat any questions of mind as if they were
specific to minds only - as I suppose a fisherman considers all
questions of the world in the context of fish.

Josh

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--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "jrstern" <jrstern@...> wrote:
>
> --- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:

<snip

> > I said this, Josh, not Neil (in case you are confusing the two of us in your question above). My issue, in saying it, was not to wonder how there could be minds in the world at all but to wonder how minds happen in the world, given the evident physical and, therefore, apparently inanimate, nature of this world in which minds occur?

> Yes, Stuart, I'm clear it was you saying this.
>
> But I wanted to take issue with it, and Neil had responded without
> taking issue with it, so I responded to both separately.

>
>
> > That is, my "how" was not a metaphysical "how" (how can things come to be, whether particular things or things in general) but a scientific one, i.e., what is it about some physical things that produces the subjectness of minds that have manifestly come to be in this world?
>
> But the question is, whether there are ANY different issues
> regarding mind, that do not also concern any mereological or
> phenomenal entities.
>

> This is a methodological question Fodor spend extensive time
> on, what questions of "mind" are really questions of scientific
> or philosophical methods more generally? Because there does seem
> to be a tendency to treat any questions of mind as if they were
> specific to minds only - as I suppose a fisherman considers all
> questions of the world in the context of fish.
>
> Josh
>
>
> =========================================

Fish, eh? I'm confused, Josh. What is Fodor taking issue with exactly? After all, my question is really only about what it is that SOME brains do which prompts us to speak of the creatures that have them in their skulls as being "conscious"?

(Is that a clean way of saying this in order to avoid the alleged mereological fallacy of ascribing consciousness to brains out of context, etc.?)

It seems to me that the question I initially expressed above ("what is it about some physical things that produces the subjectness of minds that have manifestly come to be in this world?") is a perfectly scientific question, even if what we mean by "consciousness" is not, i.e., THAT question would either be:

1) linguistic -- if the issue is what speakers of a particular language use the sounds made by those letters when pronounced to mean; or

2) philosophic -- if the issue is what kind of thinking the users of that word in the English language are engaged in (i.e., what is the conception of the presumed referent they have or think they have)?

The linguistic version of this question could, of course, be answered by recourse to a dictionary (either bi-lingual or in the language at issue, if the speaker already has facility with that language), or by asking an acknowledged fluent speaker of the language. It might also entail some ancillary questions including what other words is "consciousness" related to, what are its eytemological origins, what contexts are appropriate for its deployment(s), etc.

The philosophic version of this question would be answered, on the other hand, by exploring a range of uses demonstrated by sufficiently versed speakers of the language (in which the word occurs) and could then prompt further concerns re: what kind(s) of referring is going on when we use a term like "consciousness", what particular kind of usage (language game) is the term appropriate to, what kinds of things can count as referents (and under what circumstances), and are there different kinds of referents and referencing within which we need to orient the usage under scrutiny, etc.

It seems to me there are lots of kinds of things we can ask and say here about "consciousness" but note that my point is to consider the philosophic concerns with regard to the scientific usage (as expressed in my initially formulated question above: "what is it about some physical things that produces the subjectness of minds that have manifestly come to be in this world?").

But note, too, that my aim is NOT to ANSWER the scientific question definitively here! THAT is not a question answered in a settled way by argument alone. My effort here is ONLY to explore whether or not the scientific question is a legitimate one to ask for the purpose of applying scientific research practices to brains AND the conscious beings which have them.

SWM

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--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "jrstern" <jrstern@...> wrote:
>
> --- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
> >
> > > Is this a special case?
> > >
> > > Do you worry about how cats come to be in a world chock full of non-cats? Hot things in a world chock full of cold things?
> >

You know, Josh, I was just thinking about my earlier answer to you on the above and it struck me that it is, in fact, a perfectly legitimate question to ask in science, i.e., how do we get cats and hot things in the world? Why wouldn't it be? The answers, respectively, might be to describe things like biological theories and evolution on the one hand, the physics of temperature variation on the other. Why shouldn't we ask, just as justifiably, how we get conscious things in a world which seems made up of unconscious things and endeavor to answer it via scientific research into how that particular phenomenon of the world works? -- SWM

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--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:
>
> > > > Is this a special case?
> > > >
> > > > Do you worry about how cats come to be in a world chock full of non-cats? Hot things in a world chock full of cold things?
>
> You know, Josh, I was just thinking about my earlier answer to you on the above and it struck me that it is, in fact, a perfectly legitimate question to ask in science, i.e., how do we get cats and hot things in the world? Why wouldn't it be? The answers, respectively, might be to describe things like biological theories and evolution on the one hand, the physics of temperature variation on the other. Why shouldn't we ask, just as justifiably, how we get conscious things in a world which seems made up of unconscious things and endeavor to answer it via scientific research into how that particular phenomenon of the world works? -- SWM

What if someone comes along and asks, "Hey, why does a brain tend
to fall towards the center of the planet"? They might then suggest
it's because of the mysterious wave-function collapse that must be
a magical and mystical function of the brain and/or mind.

If your response is, "Well, it's a legitimate, scientific question,
isn't it?" the answer is, sure, of course it is, but is it after all
a question about brains or minds?

Josh

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--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "jrstern" <jrstern@...> wrote:

snip>

> What if someone comes along and asks, "Hey, why does a brain tend
> to fall towards the center of the planet"? They might then suggest
> it's because of the mysterious wave-function collapse that must be
> a magical and mystical function of the brain and/or mind.
>
> If your response is, "Well, it's a legitimate, scientific question,
> isn't it?" the answer is, sure, of course it is, but is it after all
> a question about brains or minds?
>
> Josh
> =========================================

Depends what we mean by "minds", no? If, as I would say, a mind is the state of being a subject, then the issue of gravity would seem, at least on the face of it, to be irrelevant. But if someone chose to say something along the lines of what I might imagine you saying, 'the mind is just a certain kind of brain operating in a certain way' (which on one level I wouldn't disagree with, though I would treat that as more of a causal explanation than an out and out definition), then wondering about why minds qua brains react like rocks vis a vis the pull of gravity would be a scientific question, if not an especially interesting one! -- SWM

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--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:

> You've said homeostasis is at the bottom of it and that no computer
> has homeostasis, and that simply producing a virtual homeostatic
> state in a computer won't suffice to do the same thing as really
> having it. But you haven't shown or described just what it is about
> homeostasis that gets us to intentionality

A homeostatic process is self aware (in a primitive sense) and is
adaptive to change. Those seem like plausible precursors to
consciousness and intelligence.

> Every time I ask you to answer these questions you tell me I am
> misunderstanding you or talking about something else.

I had been attempting to give explicit things that a cognitive agent
does, but that AI people are not considering. And that's where
communication breaks down.

Let me try a different example. I take out a ruler and measure my desk
to be 30 inches high. That "30 inches high" is a representation that I
created out of whole cloth. By that, I mean that if I had looked at
all of the signals being received by sensory cells, "30 inches high" is
not something I could extract from those signals. It didn't come from
signals, it came from my carrying out a procedure (a measuring
procedure).

The reason that "30 inches high" is about something, is that I created
specifically to be about something. By constrast, the usual AI
approach is to look at signals picked up by sensors. But those signals
are not intentional. They are just apparently meaningless signals
picked up. There might be something useful hidden in them, if you have
prior knowledge on how to extract. But how you get from signal to
intentional representation is not obvious if it is even possible.

So notice the difference. I start with intentions and deal with
intentional representations from the get go. The AI model starts with
meaningless signals, and I am inclined to think that it will never have
more than meaningless signals.

Think, for a moment about bird songs or whale sounds. It is quite
likely that these are some part of a communication system. And if they
are, then presumably the bird song is intentional for the birds. But we
apparently cannot determine what those bird songs are about. At best we
can look for correlations with behavior. If it were ever possible to
start with signals that are meaningless to us, and to somehow find
meaning by analysis of those signals, then this should be an ideal
case. If we can't do it, then there's not much chance that we can
program computers to do it.

> If your idea of "mechanism" is as constrained as you have described
> it above, "human artifacts" only, then it would not be surprising
> that you would make this mistake. But biological functioning is as
> mechanical (on my broader view of "mechanism") as anything else,
> even if they aren't manmade!

If everything is a mechanism, the "mechanism" loses its meaning. I
don't see anything mechanical about biological functioning. But
obviously we disagree on what the word means.

> But you seem to want to disregard mechanical explanations entirely on
> the grounds that this implies something artifactual made by humans.

That's a complete misreading. I am not saying that we should discard
mechanical explanations, and I am not saying that there's a problem
with artifacts. I was just responding to your thinking it strange that
there can be cognitive agents in a world of inanimate things. My point
was that, if anything, it is the presence of mechanisms that is
strange.

Regards,
Neil

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