Larks comments on Consciousness - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Mitchell_Porter 08 January 2010 12:18PM

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Comment author: ciphergoth 08 January 2010 04:12:50PM *  12 points [-]

Let me try coming at this another way. What would you not expect in a Turing-implementable Universe?

  • Life
  • Life that perceives, eg, threats (ie has organs adapted to be sensitive to things like light, and reacts adaptively when these organs get signals correlated with the presence of a threat)
  • Life that perceives threats and reacts to them in such a way that other closely related living things react to their reaction as if the threat was there (ie, some form of communication)
  • Life whose later actions are adaptively changed by earlier perceptions (in the sense of perceptions above), ie memory
  • Life that communicates the perceptions it remembers
  • Life whose communication has grammar, so it can say things like "I saw a tiger yesterday" or "I saw a red thing"
  • Life that asks what is red about red
  • something else?

EDIT NB: I'm asking what you see that you would not expect to see if you were looking into a Turing-universe from the outside. If your position is that there's nothing in this Universe visible to an external observer that shows it to be non-Turing, including our utterances, please make that explicit.

Comment author: Larks 09 January 2010 06:22:01PM 1 point [-]

I imagine you would expect all those; one would simply not expect the subjective experience of the colour blue.

Comment author: ciphergoth 09 January 2010 06:36:00PM *  0 points [-]

You seem to have given exactly the reply that my "EDIT NB", added before your reply, was designed to forestall.

Can you state that in terms of what you would see looking in from the outside? For example, do you think you would not see life that used phrases such as "the subjective experience of the colour blue"?

Comment author: Larks 09 January 2010 06:49:56PM *  1 point [-]

I meant I did agree with you, and that externally everything would appear exactly the same. However, from what I think is Mitchell Porter's point of view, the one thing you would not expect from such a universe is the possibility of being inside it. P-Zombies, I suppose.

EDIT: Also, sorry for not being clear re your NB.

Comment author: ciphergoth 09 January 2010 07:22:35PM *  0 points [-]

Ah, OK! I don't know whether anyone's going to try to mount a zombie-based defence of Porter's position. These are the articles it would need to reply to. M-zombies would be distinct from P-zombies in that Porter believes that physics can account for our non-zombieness, but M-zombies would still write articles asking where subjective experience comes from, even though they don't have any.

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