What is the internal behaviour? What is the "light on inside"?
How did consciousness evolve? How conscious are other animals?
How are we different from machines which are purely mechanical devices?
How is it possible for me to claim that I have awareness?
Voluntary movement and thought? How is that possible?
How cd a machine recognise itself?
Autonomy - we think, and move of our own volition , when there is nothing around. What kind of machine, which is perhaps programmed to constantly process input, heed biological conditions and pursue it's goals... What kind of machine could start questioning why it was doing those things.
Could a machine question things? Could u program something to question things? how wd it then start questioning it's own behaviour? It wd need to be able to observe it's own behaviour, and have a way of recognizing itself.
The Chinese room argument - even if you could program a machine to produce the same human behaviour, it doesn't mean it is the same system and therfore has the properties of self- awareness like we do. Chess playing machines for example , they can do what we can, but they are built completely differently. We can also do a lot more things.
What if our exact behaviour could be mapped out in terms of inputs, starting state, data and rules? If our behaviour is deterministic, then in theory something could emulate that external behaviour. But things would not be happening the same way, involving the same machinery, so you could not claim the internal behaviour was the same.
Does 'internal behaviour' make sense?if yes, how do we describe this internal behaviour as part of the physical world?
By 'internal behaviour' I mean sensations and self-awareness. Can u have awareness without self-awareness?
What are these ghostly properties 'qualia' ? Why do we think there is more going on than mechanical computation? What is consciousness?
I can imagine a computer that can process visual input such that it can detect objects. It can be programmed to say that it can see an object when an object has been detected.
When you ask the computer if it can see something, it will say yes, but there is nothing going on other than 'mechanical' computation there.
We can imagine things we see - form a picture in our mind. Visual representation.
Could u program a computer to recognise it's own output?
What is this stuff that we think we experience that is more than just blind mechanical cause and effect chains. I say I can 'see' really see. I say I can see this room and myself and all these colours, and describe what Im thinking, but what if we are just wired to think and say that how do I
Friday, January 8, 2010
Sunday, January 3, 2010
What is information?
"Information is a correlation btw two things produced by a lawful process... Causes leave effects
Symbols, their arrangement, somehow preserve the information that existed in the real world phenomena.
Intelligence only makes sense when there is a goal.
"in our daily lives we all predict and explain other ppls behaviour from what we think they know and what we think. They want. "
Information ... There is physical matter. Arrangement of matter, due to causes. Properties of this matter causes the changing of "internal state" .. The arrangement, or the information is retained in another arrangement of matter. This internal arrangement is how we store information.
What are symbols? I think they are different from internal storage of information. The pattern of ones and zeroes representing a number that u feed into pins of a circuit - is this pattern of zeroes and ones a symbol? Perhaps a symbol is a configuration of matter or state. How does symbol relate to information?
Symbols both stand for something and mechanically cause things to happen.
Do we start off with a set of beliefs and desires which are not learned? if so, how are they encoded ?
Symbols, their arrangement, somehow preserve the information that existed in the real world phenomena.
Intelligence only makes sense when there is a goal.
"in our daily lives we all predict and explain other ppls behaviour from what we think they know and what we think. They want. "
Information ... There is physical matter. Arrangement of matter, due to causes. Properties of this matter causes the changing of "internal state" .. The arrangement, or the information is retained in another arrangement of matter. This internal arrangement is how we store information.
What are symbols? I think they are different from internal storage of information. The pattern of ones and zeroes representing a number that u feed into pins of a circuit - is this pattern of zeroes and ones a symbol? Perhaps a symbol is a configuration of matter or state. How does symbol relate to information?
Symbols both stand for something and mechanically cause things to happen.
Do we start off with a set of beliefs and desires which are not learned? if so, how are they encoded ?
Friday, January 1, 2010
Are mental things fundamentally different to matter? Are minds products of evolutionary forces
Steve pinker makes the point that to reverse engineer the mind, we must take into consideration the evolutionary forces.
How does the mental world, the world of meaning, intention, concepts etc, fit into the material world described by physics? Are mental things fundamentally different to matter, is it another kind of stuff? Is it independent from matter somehow?
The idea behind computational theory of mind, that a mind , like a program , is independent of the implementation of machine that is executing it , wd say that mind is independent. It seems possible for me, as a mind to exist outside of my body , perhaps in a machine or computer :)
"entities like 'wanting to go to grandmas house' are colorless , odourless but at the same time are causes of physical events, as potent as any billiard ball clacking onto another"
Talks about that our brains use assumptions about the world to solve otherwise impossible problems, like determining a world of objects from a retinal image - we assume this world has even illumination. Common sense - a lot of the deductions we make, use assumptions about our world and human behaviour.
Says that natural selection works on the order of thousands of generations, that 99% of our time we lived as nomadic bands. We have minds adapted for the stone age - is that why we get so stressed?
How does the mental world, the world of meaning, intention, concepts etc, fit into the material world described by physics? Are mental things fundamentally different to matter, is it another kind of stuff? Is it independent from matter somehow?
The idea behind computational theory of mind, that a mind , like a program , is independent of the implementation of machine that is executing it , wd say that mind is independent. It seems possible for me, as a mind to exist outside of my body , perhaps in a machine or computer :)
"entities like 'wanting to go to grandmas house' are colorless , odourless but at the same time are causes of physical events, as potent as any billiard ball clacking onto another"
Talks about that our brains use assumptions about the world to solve otherwise impossible problems, like determining a world of objects from a retinal image - we assume this world has even illumination. Common sense - a lot of the deductions we make, use assumptions about our world and human behaviour.
Says that natural selection works on the order of thousands of generations, that 99% of our time we lived as nomadic bands. We have minds adapted for the stone age - is that why we get so stressed?
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