1 Ok I get that if they sell the shares there won't be any more dividends. But shouldn't they be getting something--like, maybe money--for the shares they sell? It's not like they're going to have to be paying capital gains tax on the sale, being the government and all....

2 Wasn't there talk of not retiring the debt so that Australia would still have a bond market?

3 The really, really, really stupid thing about the article is that they can re-invest the money and get the same amount in interest as they're getting in dividends. Duh.

4 Susie - yep, about $30 billion. I think they should spend it on a big party. Jojo - I haven't heard that. It makes a weird kind of sense, except for that fact that it would lose money. TallDave - I understand the money is being set aside to cover public service pensions (or to put it another way, to reduce taxes). But apparently, The Age thinks this means its going to be hidden in the mattress. If you have $30 billion, you can't not earn interest on it. What you don't get, of course, is appreciation of the asset, but that sort of distinction is as far beyond their grasp as a very far thing.

5 Plus, there's also the even more obvious fact that instead of a company, they have, you know, 30 billion dollars. Sheesh.

6 ya pidoras, pizu chujie doors, zaabuzte moi url - http://greatpharmacies.com/ a suda pishite pisma i spamte - admass@pisem.net

1 i'm a quantumist and proud of it. but i'm not sure if i am a tegmarkian or a penrosian. and you forgot wine.

G-d made man

frail as a bubble

G-d made love

love made trouble

G-d made the vine

was it a sin

that man made wine to drown trouble in?

2 Wine too. :)

3 this typekey stuff is so flakey--every third comment puts me back in MT purgatory.

but pixy, if matter and energy are the underlying substrate for the electro-biochemical processes of thought and memory, don't we have to have quantum consiciousness?

4 No. Or if so, only in the same sense that we have quantum car keys and quantum tennis balls. Quantum mechanics underlies everything, but in general, the quantum effects are averaged out rather than amplified (which gives us, for example, chemistry). Penrose argues that consciousness cannot be the result of biochemical brain function, and must be the direct result of quantum fairies (I think they're even quantum gravity fairies). The beer argument shows that this is not so. The effect of beer on consciousness makes no sense if consciousness is generated by quantum gravity fairies, but is perfectly natural if consciousness is a product of biochemistry. Alcohol has no effect on quantum gravity, but it has a very direct effect on biochemistry. Berkelian Idealism is in an even worse position vis-a-vis beer. If mind is what exists, how does beer, a mere shadow of the mind, manage to disrupt mind function? And Dualism is inherently self-contradictory, so Dualists tend to drink a lot.

5 mmmmm...beer....

6 I must be a dualist, then.

7 Is consciousness is the result of brain chemistry alone -- or of any system, chemical or otherwise, that processes information in a particular way? If the Strong Beer Theory is correct, then only chemical systems can have consciousness. If the Weak Beer Theory is correct, then only chemical systems or systems that directly model chemical systems can have consciousness. If the Bloody Useless Warm Pommy Beer theory is correct, then systems can have consciousness without necessarily having any relation to chemical systems.

8 I have a nasty cold and right now my consciousness seems to be the result of cottage cheese, but I'll try to answer. The effect of beer on human consciousness shows us that our consciousness is the result of brain chemistry, but provides no information on whether this must be so in general. So only the BUWPBT is supported by evidence. I see no reason that the SBT should be true, and I sincerely doubt that the WBT is true.

9 That's pretty much my own opinion. I'd love to see a glorified Babbage machine (several dozen hectares of it) develop consciousness. Hope your cold goes away soon.

10 In Penrose's theory, quantum gravity matters for biochemical dynamics! Penrose has a technical argument that superpositions of "different enough" geometries are ill-defined - I believe the problem is that general relativity offers no natural way to synchronize the passage of time throughout the different components of the superposition. He even has an experiment meant to differentiate "objective wavefunction collapse" from decoherence, the known phenomenon it would most closely resemble. In any case, the bottom line is that if a chemical enters the brain and (for example) causes microtubule wavefunctions to decohere more often, then the theory does predict that it should alter the character of consciousness. And in fact this is how his collaborator Stuart Hameroff proposes to explain the effect of anesthetics.

11 In Penrose's theory, quantum gravity matters for biochemical dynamics! But that's clearly nonsense, because biochemical dynamics are fully explained by normal chemistry. Quantum gravity is irrelevant. In any case, the bottom line is that if a chemical enters the brain and (for example) causes microtubule wavefunctions to decohere more often, then the theory does predict that it should alter the character of consciousness. Which is also clearly nonsense, because the same chemical is causing far more significant biochemical changes directly. Even if Penrose's quantum fairies existed, they'd be drowned in the noise of the biochemical processes. Sorry, but Penrose's ideas are at odds with everything we know about how the brain works, and how it doesn't work, and that's a hell of a lot. It's just the pointless speculation of a mathematical physicist in a field he knows nothing about.

12 Quantum mechanics, as it stands, is not a complete theory of reality - "observables" are ascribed definite values only at the moment of measurement. Some people (parapsychologists, metaphysical idealists, free-will advocates) are happy to suppose that this is the whole story, and that the act of observation collapses the wavefunction. However, if you press them on this issue, the vast majority of physicists don't want to take that avenue, and so we have the various new formulations of quantum theory (Everett, Bohm, Cramer) that are meant to put the theory on a more objective and less anthropocentric basis. This is a problem that every contemporary materialist should know about and take very seriously.

Chemistry is really the quantum theory of electrons interacting with nuclei, and it inherits this same conceptual problem. What is the *actual* state of an electron in an orbital? Is it literally in all those places at once, or is it just in one of them? We may get to evade this question in most empirical contexts, but we have no excuse for ignoring it altogether. In Penrose's theory, quantum jumps are controlled by quantum gravity, not by "observation", and so quantum gravity is the ultimate determinant of the *actual* state. This is the sense in which "quantum gravity matters for biochemical dynamics" in his theory.

Next, neuroscience. The quest for the "neural correlates of consciousness" - that is, the part of the brain whose physical state is somehow to be equated with the subjective state of consciousness - is a mainstream preoccupation by now. Hameroff and Penrose are saying one needs to pick out not just a brain region, but actually a particular subcellular structure. E.g. that the physical correlate of visual consciousness is not just "neurons in the visual cortex", but, more precisely, quantum-entangled microtubules in neurons in the visual cortex. I'll return to the empirical merits of this particular hypothesis shortly. But if one can entertain it for a moment, it is clear that a biochemical change will be relevant to the state of consciousness, only if it eventually impacts on the quantum state of the microtubules, for instance by damping the thermal noise to which you refer. This strikes me as a rather fruitfully stringent criterion. It does not obfuscate; it invites inquiry about mechanism. The only trouble is that it's presently difficult to investigate exact quantum states in biological matter (with a few exceptions, such as NMR), but that situation will improve with time.

Now to the question of whether quantum-brain theories are badly motivated. Since it is clearly possible, in our current state of ignorance, that quantum computation occurs in the brain, this can only be a question of research *priorities*: one might say that we do know it's unlikely, or that the arguments advanced in its favor are spurious. Penrose, of course, got here via Turing and Goedel. I do not think the arguments for noncomputable mind are particularly potent, because we have no evidence that the human mind really can "jump out of the system" indefinitely. I have my own reasons for being interested in quantum-brain theories, namely (1) the unitary character of consciousness (2) the un-objectively fuzzy character, from a microphysical perspective, of classical computational states (3) the possible evolutionary advantages of (e.g.) quantum search over classical search. But if you do have an a-priori interest in the quantum mind, then microtubules really are a promising place to look, on account of their high degree of symmetry, something which can enhance quantum effects.

13 Ugh. The human brain doesn't do anything resembling quantum computation. What it does do is exactly what you would expect a biochemical system of that nature to do. That's the thing: There's nothing that requires a quantum-mechanical explanation, there's no evidence that there are direct (rather than statistical) quantum-mechanical influences, and there's no plausible mechanism for this to happen. You refer to "our current state of ignorance". We're not that ignorant about what's going on in the brain, far from it. And there's not the slightest shred of evidence from any direction that it's quantum-mechanical in nature. I mean, you refer to the possible evolutionary advantages of (e.g.) quantum search over classical search, when there is no evidence at all that the brain does quantum searches. It sure as hell doesn't act that way, so the evolutionary advantage would seem to be nil. Chemistry is really the quantum theory of electrons interacting with nuclei, and it inherits this same conceptual problem. Chemistry inherits nothing of the sort. Chemistry works. Chemistry doesn't care about that level of abstraction; it's simply not relevant. Oh, and Chemistry is the theory of electrons interacting with other electrons. Nuclei barely enter into it; they can be viewed as positively charged point masses in almost every case. But if one can entertain it for a moment, it is clear that a biochemical change will be relevant to the state of consciousness, only if it eventually impacts on the quantum state of the microtubules, for instance by damping the thermal noise to which you refer. I'm not talking about thermal noise, I'm talking about systemic noise. It's incontrovertible that the brain processes information at the cellular level. We can - and do - watch this happening. We can see the effects of, say, alcohol on this cellular function at the same time as we observe its effects on consciousness - as expressed, once more, via the brain. What I am pointing out is that the drastic biochemical impact of alcohol (in our example) would drown out any quantum-gravitational influence on or from the microtubules. Since quantum effects could make no difference either way, and yet we do see a very marked change, it is clear that the change is coming from the biochemical system and that quantum has nothing to do with it. And if the microtubules were having a sufficiently significant effect to influence the system beyond the level of the direct biochemical activity, that would be directly detectible with current equipent, and we see nothing. It just isn't happening. You can't get to where Penrose is purely via Goedel and Turing; you have to change trains at Dennet and head up the Unfounded Speculation Line. Oh, and: In Penrose's theory, quantum jumps are controlled by quantum gravity I'll bet you five dollars that this is not a theory in the scientific sense. It's right up Penrose's alley - unlike the rest of this stuff - but if it was an actual theory it would have actually made some impact on QM. And it hasn't.

14 In fact, that last bit sounds very much like an interpretation rather than a theory, and I expect that it is not testable in any way. There are plenty of interpretations of QM already, and Penrose is welcome to add his own, but it doesn't change the calculations.

15 To put it another way: If quantum gravity resonance in microtubules is really the source of consciousness, then it is somewhat curious that the result is indistinguishable from biochemistry.

16 Well, it's my impression (from seminars, from the literature) that we have hardly begun to think about cellular biophysics. The prevailing physical conception of the cell is something like: a reaction-diffusion chamber for gene products, some of which self-organize into supramolecular complexes that do stuff. And (to put it polemically), genetics tells us what those complexes do, but not how they do it. For that, one needs a model of physical mechanism.

Drexler's Nanosystems has a nice overview of the spectrum of modelling choices available. The bottom rung (quantum field theory) is indeed considered irrelevant to biophysics. But this is just a default-conservative assumption, made by people who are already preoccupied with understanding higher-level complexities, and not the result of any systematic consideration of the subject. The pseudo-crystalline structure of the cytoskeleton, and the microtubule's two-dimensional array of symmetrically coupled subunits, makes it a natural place to look for quantum many-body effects, for example among mobile electrons, whose activities would be coupled to conformational change and thus to molecular function. Furthermore, the cytoskeleton is a highly dynamic structure implicated in a wide variety of cellular processes; and it has a unique form (no "centrioles") in neurons. The information processing that we know about in neurons (action potential propagation, synaptic transmission) very definitely interacts with intracellular state changes, e.g. the "second messenger" system, and, in a quantum-brain model, should presumably be viewed as a form of classical co-processing. (Every model of quantum computation I've ever seen also features auxiliary classical computation.)

I could say much more about biological detail but I should answer a few other points. My list of reasons for being interested (such as "advantages of quantum search") are reasons to take an a-priori interest in the hypothesis, at a time when there is no empirical evidence either way. Exotic quantum effects in biomolecules will be "indistinguishable from biochemistry" because empirically, biochemistry is defined as what biomolecules are observed to do, and often we don't know the physical mechanisms involved in how they do it (e.g. protein folding). As for Penrose's amendment to quantum theory, he has managed to extract a testable prediction from it (see my first comment, second link). But it's a difficult experiment.

17 But this is just a default-conservative assumption, made by people who are already preoccupied with understanding higher-level complexities, and not the result of any systematic consideration of the subject. No. It's the null hypothesis. In the absence of any evidence whatsoever that anything of the sort is happening, you don't run off into wild speculations about it. The information processing that we know about in neurons (action potential propagation, synaptic transmission) very definitely interacts with intracellular state changes, e.g. the "second messenger" system, and, in a quantum-brain model, should presumably be viewed as a form of classical co-processing. No. There is no sign of quantum processing at all. Nothing that the brain does looks anything like quantum processing, in terms of operations or results. Exotic quantum effects in biomolecules will be "indistinguishable from biochemistry" because empirically, biochemistry is defined as what biomolecules are observed to do That's complete nonsense. Penrose isn't talking about quantum effects within molecules, he's talking about quantum events within cell structures. The first is biochemistry, the latter most definitely is not. If there were quantum gravity events being amplified by microtubules in such a way so that it gave rise to consciousness, we would know, because consciousness would not be correlated directly and in every case with brain chemistry. (Or at least, we would know that there was something other than just biochemistry going on.) But the converse is true. Consciousness always correlates with brain biochemistry; changes in consciousness always correlate with changes in brain biochemistry. There is simply no reason to believe that anything else is going on. Penrose's speculation on consciousness is magic fairies and nothing more. My list of reasons for being interested (such as "advantages of quantum search") are reasons to take an a-priori interest in the hypothesis, at a time when there is no empirical evidence either way. There is no evidence that the brain performs quantum searches. None. It doesn't matter how much of an evolutionary advantage it might be if it doesn't actually exist. The "searches" that the brain does perform act nothing like quantum searches. So there is empirical evidence, and it is that there aren't quantum searches. It's not sufficient for falsification because Penrose's speculation is just speculation and can't be falsified. I took a look at that diagram you linked to; of itself it tells me nothing, but presumably there is more to it than that. Penrose is, after all, a competent mathematical physicist; it's just outside of that field that he gets hopelessly lost.

18 A Kane quantum chip should look superficially just like an ordinary silicon chip. You would have to discover the phosphorus dopants and surmise their purpose to figure out that there was more than classical computation taking place.

But let's short-circuit this debate, which from my perspective really is about the necessity of "wild speculations". I think the Hameroff-Penrose theory is not as arbitrary as people say, but it certainly involves simultaneous multiple hypotheses. The theory's advocates should spend less time trying to interest the world, and more time developing the theory. But even if Penrose were shown to be 100% correct about brain physics, it would only be an incremental advance philosophically. Materialism about the mind, in every form that I have ever seen, either posits the identity of two very dissimilar things, or tries to deny the mental entirely; and Penrose's theory does not change this.

Consider everyone's favorite, color perception. What do the colors that one actually perceives have in common with an electromagnetic pulse of a certain wavelength, or with a particular spiking pattern in a neuron? Both the latter are arrangements of colorless matter in space-time, so where does the "color" come from? And the Dennett Line terminates with the even more fantastic conclusion that, despite appearances, color isn't actually there. Naturalistic philosophy of mind reduces to a Hobson's choice between impossibilities. I conclude that the metaphysics of naturalism is a bit too parsimonious, and that we must acknowledge ontological categories beyond those countenanced by mathematical physics. Understanding how they might relate to familiar categories such as number and form is the real challenge.

19 You would have to discover the phosphorus dopants and surmise their purpose to figure out that there was more than classical computation taking place. That depends very much on what it was doing. Quantum and classical processors work entirely differently, and it is very easy to distinguish between them based on their results. (Not in every case, true. But you can choose your tests.) I think the Hameroff-Penrose theory is not as arbitrary as people say, but it certainly involves simultaneous multiple hypotheses. Well yeah. As I said, wild speculation. Materialism about the mind, in every form that I have ever seen, either posits the identity of two very dissimilar things, or tries to deny the mental entirely Huh? I don't know what you have been reading, but it sounds like no materialism I have ever heard of. What do the colors that one actually perceives have in common with an electromagnetic pulse of a certain wavelength, or with a particular spiking pattern in a neuron? Conscious perception of colour is the product of the brain's processing of the physical perception of colour. (Or of a memory, of course.) Both the latter are arrangements of colorless matter in space-time, so where does the "color" come from? It's information. That's what the brain does, after all; it processes information. And the Dennett Line terminates with the even more fantastic conclusion that, despite appearances, color isn't actually there. Isn't where? In the brain? Of course not. What's there is the representation of colour. Naturalistic philosophy of mind reduces to a Hobson's choice between impossibilities. Well, if it does, that will come as a surprise to Naturalists, because no-one has ever shown this to be the case. I conclude that the metaphysics of naturalism is a bit too parsimonious, and that we must acknowledge ontological categories beyond those countenanced by mathematical physics. And I am waiting, not entirely patiently, for someone to provide me with a coherent explanation for why they believe this. The upshot of all this is that Penrosian Consciousness is just Cartesian Dualism in a Quantum Hat. Right?

20 Penrose should not be held responsible for the views I am now expressing. :-)

So. My experience of the world includes visual sensations of color. I wish to know what, in materialist terms, color is. Your answer seems to be the following. First there is the "physical perception of color", which I take to be the physical response of sensory neurons to the physical stimulus of light. Then a series of neural computations occur, producing a "representation of color", which I take to be some sort of state of cortical neurons. In other words, all we have are states of neurons - which, on a physicalist account, are assemblies of colorless particles in space. No color so far. So where is the color? What is it? It's "information". But what is that? Is it perhaps a quantitative physical property, such as the Shannon information in the state of a particular set of neurons? Because that would be a very strange thing for color to actually be - the logarithm of a probability. I don't see how venturing into the configuration space of a set of colorless objects brings us any closer to actually having color there.

Given the premises so far, I see three options here. You can take the Dennett Line, throw up your hands and say, there's nothing to the phenomenon of color beyond what you've described. You can be an identity theorist and assert that color is information. Or you can be an "information dualist", and say that color and information aren't the same, but they're linked somehow. Is there another option?

21 My experience of the world includes visual sensations of color. As does mine! So, we're clearly starting from a point of agreement. First there is the "physical perception of color", which I take to be the physical response of sensory neurons to the physical stimulus of light. Correct. Then a series of neural computations occur, producing a "representation of color", which I take to be some sort of state of cortical neurons. Not a state, but a process. This probably isn't important in this example, but perceptions are processes, not states. In other words, all we have are states of neurons - which, on a physicalist account, are assemblies of colorless particles in space. With my previous proviso, yes. No color so far. No colour; only the representation of colour. So where is the color? Exactly where it was. What is it? It's "information". Or more precisely, information being processed. But what is that? It's information. Is it perhaps a quantitative physical property, such as the Shannon information in the state of a particular set of neurons? Eh? Because that would be a very strange thing for color to actually be - the logarithm of a probability. I'm not sure how that even applies. I don't see how venturing into the configuration space of a set of colorless objects brings us any closer to actually having color there. Well, it doesn't. You don't have colour there. You have a representation of colour. It's information, or an information process. I keep pointing this out: The brain doesn't process things, it processes information about things. You won't find colour in the brain, any more than you will find wombats or refrigerators. Given the premises so far, I see three options here. Fourth option: Your terms aren't well-defined. Define colour. Then come back if you still have a problem. If you expect colour as it is defined in physics to be present in the brain, you are bound to be disappointed. If you expect colour as it is perceived in the brain to be the same thing as handled by the laws of optics, then still more disappointment looms. But in the two cases, colour is defined entirely differently. If you pick a definition and stick to it, there isn't a problem. It's only because you are conflating multiple definitions of colour that you perceive a problem. Think of the brain as a computer. It is, after all, just not much like the ones on our desks. You take a picture with your webcam, and the computer saves it as a bunch of numbers. Where's the colour? The computer can tell you that a particular pixel is orange. Where's the colour? All it has is numbers. Where's the computer's perception of orangeness? It must have one, because it just told us that it perceived that colour. The fact that it would only take a few lines of code to do this is irrelevant.

22 Color is that ensemble of location-specific properties (hue, saturation, brightness) which fills every visible shape.

Your turn: define information.

By the way, I can look in a paint catalog and have it inform me, correctly, that various squares of color on the page are red, orange, etc. This is not to be explained by attributing "perceptions" to the catalog. But there is no need to do this in the case of the computer, either.

23 hmmm...but, pixy, if you are saying the brain is like a computer, then you are implying turing computability, and we're back to Godel, Hilbert, Turing, Church, Searle, etc, and the tiling problem and the haltling problem and the diophantine equation problem that have all been been proven computationally insoluable. Perhaps beer generates quantum effects as well as biochemical ones. ;-)

24 Color is that ensemble of location-specific properties (hue, saturation, brightness) which fills every visible shape. Well if it's location-specific, obviously you're not going to find it in the brain, which makes me wonder why you asked the question in the first place. Your turn: define information. In what context? Computer science? Physics? Cognitive science? By the way, I can look in a paint catalog and have it inform me, correctly, that various squares of color on the page are red, orange, etc. You can also look at a paint catalog and have it inform you, incorrectly, that various squares of colour on the page are puce, fuchsia, orangutan, skorkle, etc. Because the paint catalog is a static object; it doesn't process information in any way. This is not to be explained by attributing "perceptions" to the catalog. Right. But there is no need to do this in the case of the computer, either. Wrong. You can present any image to the computer, choose any part of that image, and the computer will tell you what colour it is. That necessarily requires a perception of colour. That perception of colour is trivial and shallow, but that doesn't matter. You can't dismiss the existence of something just because you understand how it works.

25 Your turn: define information. i'll take that one, mitch-- Dr. Zeilinger says information and reality are the same thing--but he can't prove it...yet.

26 hmmm...but, pixy, if you are saying the brain is like a computer, then you are implying turing computability No. I'm not saying that consciousness isn't Turing computable, but it is perfectly clear that the brain is not a Turing machine. Godel, Hilbert, Turing, Church, Searle sings: One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn't belong the tiling problem and the haltling problem and the diophantine equation problem that have all been been proven computationally insoluable. The brain can't solve computationally insoluble problems either. At least not certain classes of such. For example, the brain is necessarily bound by Gödel's incompleteness theorem - not because the brain is a formal system (it isn't), but because if you want to carry out rigorous reasoning about mathematics, you have to use a formal system. The work of Church and Turing likewise applies to a non-Turing computational system that is performing a task according to Turning-equivalent rules. Searle, on the other hand, is only useful for teaching freshman philosophy students how to detect flawed arguments.

27 information and reality are the same thing I'm not convinced that is even a meaningful statement.

28 Searle, on the other hand, is only useful for teaching freshman philosophy students how to detect flawed arguments. huh? i was refering to the chinese room problem, which Penrose feels gives some support to his position, that "a 'simulation' of understanding is not equal to 'actual' understanding."

29 The fundamental reason why I believe in this is that it is impossible to make an operational distinction between reality and information. In other words, whenever we make any statement about the world, about any object, about any feature of any object, we always make statements about the information we have. And, whenever we make scientific predictions we make statements about information we possibly attain in the future. So one might be tempted to believe that everything is just information. The danger there is solipsism and subjectivism. But we know, even as we cannot prove it, that there is reality out there. For me the strongest argument for a reality independent of us is the randomness of the individual quantum event, like the decay of a radioactive atom. There is no hidden reason why a given atom decays at the very instant it does so. Anton Zeilinger performed the quantum teleportation experiment http://www.quantum.univie.ac.at/

30 And Pixy, (this is so fun, thanx, even if you are kicking my ass), my basic problem with the biochemical basis of consciousness theory, is that biochemistry is computable. Non?

31 huh? i was refering to the chinese room problem, which Penrose feels gives some support to his position, that "a 'simulation' of understanding is not equal to 'actual' understanding." That's what I thought you were referring to - after all, it's what Searle is best known for. And it's complete tripe. The Chinese Room clearly understands Chinese. Every conceivable external test - by defintion, as Searle proposed it - shows this to be so. Searle then complains that if he breaks the room up, he can't find the Understanding. There's a man, who doesn't understand Chinese, and there are a whole lot of books, which don't understand anything at all. It's just the Fallacy of Division again. It keeps popping up in this sort of argument. Understanding Chinese is a property of the system, not of the components. If Penrose thinks Searle's argument supports him, that's all the more reason to consider Penrose to be hopelessly lost.

32 And Pixy, (this is so fun, thanx, even if you are kicking my ass), my basic problem with the biochemical basis of consciousness theory, is that biochemistry is computable. Non? Non. Biochemistry is statistical.

33 The fundamental reason why I believe in this is that it is impossible to make an operational distinction between reality and information. In other words, whenever we make any statement about the world, about any object, about any feature of any object, we always make statements about the information we have. Yes. So one might be tempted to believe that everything is just information. I don't think that follows. The danger there is solipsism and subjectivism. I think we can reject them on purely utilitarian grounds - they don't work. But we know, even as we cannot prove it, that there is reality out there. Yep. That's the underlying assumption of metaphysical Materialism - that reality is independent of us. For me the strongest argument for a reality independent of us is the randomness of the individual quantum event, like the decay of a radioactive atom. There is no hidden reason why a given atom decays at the very instant it does so. Under most models of QM, yes. There are models of QM where there are causes for such events, but I don't think those models have had much success (either they turn out to make wrong predictions, or they are indistinguishable from acausal QM in practical terms).

34 Biochemistry is statistical. i don't think so...we can model a protein unfolding or molecular docking for example. maybe i don't understand what you mean by statistical?

35 i don't think so...we can model a protein unfolding or molecular docking for example. maybe i don't understand what you mean by statistical? Biochemistry - all chemistry, in fact - is a higher-level statistical model built on top of quantum mechanics. The earlier (pre-QM) chemists didn't realise this, of course, but they were empiricists and chemistry worked and that was good enough. You can model biochemistry, but that's not the same thing as computing it. But we still don't have any reason to believe that consciousness isn't Turing-computable.

36 why isn't modelling/simulation the same as computation? But we still don't have any reason to believe that consciousness isn't Turing-computable. then, if we can modell brain processes at a fine enough granularity, like the calcium gradient and all, then we should be able to build an AI that would exhibit consciousness?

37 this is so fun, thanx, even if you are kicking my ass I'm enjoying it too. This is one of the best discussions I ever had on the subject. It's not about ass-kicking, though, it's about learning. ... Okay, maybe a little ass-kicking. ;)

38 well, i am learning. ;-)

39 why isn't modelling/simulation the same as computation? It can be - but it depends on what you are modelling, and how you are modelling it. The idea of a model, the reason models are useful, is that they are simplified representations of something. To fully compute a biochemical process, you have to compute the acausal quantum events that underlie it. I think you can appreciate the problem there. then, if we can modell brain processes at a fine enough granularity, like the calcium gradient and all, then we should be able to build an AI that would exhibit consciousness? Well, no; at least, not necessarily. The brain can be modelled, but it isn't Turing-computible. But the fact that consciousness arises from a process that isn't Turing-computible doesn't provide any information on whether consciousness is or isn't Turing-computible itself. I suspect that it is, based on the models we have, but it's just a suspicion.

40 But we still don't have any reason to believe that consciousness isn't Turing-computable. hmmm...but neither do we have a reason to believe that it is. i shall have to regroup, and get fresh armor. a demain?

41 hmmm...but neither do we have a reason to believe that it is. Well, we have some reason - certain properties that we usually attribute to consciousness have been shown to be computable - but nothing conclusive. i shall have to regroup, and get fresh armor. No problem. a demain? A which-what? By the way, have you read Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid? It is without a doubt the best introduction to this whole field. You're clearly past the introductory stage, but it still has a lot to offer. I was 16 when I read it (my mother bought it for me for Christmas...) and it just tied everything together for me. It didn't change my way of thinking, but it brought me to understand my way of thinking.

42 [Define information in] what context? Computer science? Physics? Cognitive science?

In whatever context you had in mind when you first said that color is information, or a product of information processing. I brought up Shannon information because I know how to define that as a property of a physical system.

Well if [color is] location-specific, obviously you're not going to find it in the brain, which makes me wonder why you asked the question in the first place.

That's location in "visual space". I don't know if that changes anything for you.

But consider what we have so far. We have a "physical perception of color" (an event in a sense organ) and a neural "representation of color", neither of which has color in the straightforward sense, I think we are agreed; and no other physical entity has been mooted as relevant so far.

It might be clearer if I expanded this discussion to take in the whole world of appearances, since that is where the color I'm talking about resides. Once upon a time ;-), we managed to agree that we both have visual sensations of color. These sensations also have forms, which are the objects of visual experience. I am trying to adopt a language here which does not presuppose materialism; there was a time when I did not know about atoms or brains, but I did know that I could "see things". Now as an adult I am told that "seeing" is an activity of my brain, that the things I see directly are in some sense in my brain, but that (unless I am hallucinating) they have a causally-mediated resemblance to physical objects external to my body. The question is whether this account makes sense, given our current conception of matter. I submit that it does not, because the things we see directly have properties (such as color) which nothing in the universe of physical theory has.

At the dawn of mathematical physics, a distinction was made between primary qualities, such as length, and secondary qualities, such as color. It was somehow agreed that primary qualities were in the world external to us, but secondary qualities were not; they were in us, not in the world. But now that our brains are like the rest of the physical world, the secondary qualities are simply nowhere - in theory. In reality, of course, they're still right there in front of us, where they always were. But they represent more of a philosophical conundrum now that there are no souls for them to inhabit.

Dennett's response, it seems to me, really is to deny the existence of the so-called secondary qualities. See his discussion of "figment" in Consciousness Explained. But this is untenable; color, in precisely this sense, is a primary epistemological datum. So I think we need to backtrack to the last time we had an ontology featuring both primary and secondary qualities - somewhere between Descartes and Russell - and go forward again from there, alongside the path that physics already took, but being careful to maintain a sense of the reality of the neglected aspects of experience. If that requires dabbling in solipsism, idealism, or dualism for a while, so be it. I see no reason why a new monism should not eventually be possible, which we might even still call materialism, but it's going to have to be ontologically richer than what we now call naturalism.

Since I do think that states of consciousness could be and would be states of "something in the brain" in a new monism (by which I mean, only one type of substance; not literally only one thing in existence), a monism that must explain everything that naturalistic physics already explains, you might reasonably ask whether I would expect states of consciousness in existing computers as well. I do not, even though the brain presently looks to us like a classical computer, as we originally discussed. If I line up the features of consciousness as known from the inside, with the features of computers as known from the outside, I find that consciousness for computers would require a very complicated psychophysical dualism (that is, the laws describing the association would have to be very complicated). It's not logically impossible, but I rate it as less likely than quantum computing in the brain, and a monism in which consciousness requires quantum entanglement between its parts.

43 Zeilinger, Searle, and Hofstadter... Saying that reality is made of information seems to be the new Platonism. In Aristotle, you have substance, you have form, and they need each other. In Plato you just have form (at least, that's what they say he meant). Similarly, in computationalist materialism, you have matter, and you have information, and the information resides in the matter. Because he talks about epistemology - "it is impossible to make an operational distinction between reality and information" - I think Zeilinger's abolition of matter implicitly relies on the existence of a mind to be an alternative host for the information he talks about. So he (and others like him) may be halfway to inventing a new metaphysical idealism. Actually, you see this already in those versions of the many-worlds interpretation which only ascribe reality to branches with observers. And Tegmark says similar things in his "all possible worlds" paper, although as I recall he equivocates between saying that uninhabited worlds do not exist, and saying that their existence is merely irrelevant.

Searle I agree with; his Room doesn't understand anything, unless some peculiar form of dualism obtains. But then I think he doesn't go far enough, because he thinks that the physical brain, as described by contemporary natural science, can be a locus of "intrinsic intentionality". As a matter of logic, he should find that just as difficult to believe, but his simultaneous belief in naturalism and in consciousness leads him to trust that it must be possible, somehow. So I would agree with the criticism that there's a certain inconsistency in Searle, but I take off in the opposite direction from his critics.

Hofstadter... I read him around the same age, and I suppose I accepted his views. I know that by 20 I was already entertaining the idea that the self was a single knotted superstring, so atomism bothered me then; and by 22 or so I was an "aspect dualist", thinking in terms of correlation, rather than identity, between the string's topology and the mind's propositional state, so I had implicitly abandoned naturalism at that point. Anyway, as I recall, Hofstadter tries to escape Searle's dictum that "syntax is not semantics" (i.e. the physical tokens in a computational device do not have intrinsic meanings, and so cannot be regarded as components of a thought) by exhibiting puns, Godel sentences, and a variety of other objects whose semantics are more complex than "A represents B". But in every scenario he advances, I think you can separate out the intricacies which are causal, physical, and intrinsic, and the intricacies which are semantic and introduced by an act of interpretation. So I don't think he solved the "symbol-grounding problem" at all.

44 Searle I agree with; his Room doesn't understand anything But this is obviously incorrect. If you ask the room a question, you get back a meaningful answer; that is, after all, how Searle defined the room. That clearly requires understanding. There is no way around this, except for redefining "understanding" in terms that deny Naturalism. Which immediately defeats the purpose. If you don't know that you are talking to a room, if you think you are talking to a person who speaks Chinese, you would not hesitate to ascribe understanding to your correspondant. The results are exactly the same in each case, yet Searle claims that understanding is present in one situation and not in the other, even though he can't point to the location of this understanding in either case. It's simply the Logical Fallacy of Division, again.

45 Anyway, as I recall, Hofstadter tries to escape Searle's dictum that "syntax is not semantics" (i.e. the physical tokens in a computational device do not have intrinsic meanings, and so cannot be regarded as components of a thought) ... But in every scenario he advances, I think you can separate out the intricacies which are causal, physical, and intrinsic, and the intricacies which are semantic and introduced by an act of interpretation. Hmm. I'll have to take another look at it, because I don't remember Hofstadter's argument as you do. But in any case: Robots. A robot processes symbols and then interprets them by acting on them in the real world. (If that's not an act of interpretation, I don't know what is.) Syntax might not be semantics, I would say, but semantics is syntax. The only way semantics can be expressed or interpreted is via syntax.

46 a demain= until tomorrow, but this is really demain prochaine, tomorrow next. ;-) this is getting really good...mitch, i am a platonian (bird view) and i think pixy is an aristotelian (frog view)...which are you?

47 The brain can be modelled, but it isn't Turing-computible. But the fact that consciousness arises from a process that isn't Turing-computible doesn't provide any information on whether consciousness is or isn't Turing-computible itself. At the risk of side-tracking a very interesting conversation (and, potentially, nit-picking), what is the evidence that the brain isn't Turing-computable? If you mean that the brain isn't a Turing machine, I agree whole-heartedly (the brain is simply an extremely powerful analog pattern recognition/storage system, with a few of those GEB:EGB loops thrown in for fun); but that is fundamentally different than saying that the processes by which the brain functions aren't Turing computable. The brain accepts multiple sources of input (both internal and external), routes that information across certain neurons based on pattern-specific information (that is, input containing one pattern will fire one set of neurons, etc.), in the process reinforcing those biochemical pathways which serve to recognize/store those specific patterns, then generates output - output in this sense meaning both the action response the brain generates, and the continual firing of nuerons that represents our conciousness. None of these processes is inherently non-Turing-computable. The primary process, pattern recognition and response, has been increasingly modeled by nueral-network systems, and since those systems function on the same basic principle as an actual brain, a Turing system of sufficient complexity should be able to exactly reproduce the processes that occur in said brain. The only inherent difference that I can see is that a brain is an analog system and a Turing machine is not, but here Avogadro's number saves me - at a small enough level of granularity, there are no analog systems. This, of course, ties back into the quantum mechanics discussion, but, as you said, biochemistry is statistical, and thus can be accurately modelled. So, therefore, a Turing machine with sufficiently complex instructions should be able to exactly model and reproduce the functions of any specific individual's brain; ie., a given brain is indeed Turing computable. Of course, I'm neither nueroscientist nor AI research, and have at best a layman's understanding of each of those fields, so if there's evidence of which I'm not aware that contradicts any of my conjectures (or I'm misunderstanding what you mean by Turing-computable), I will bow to your superior knowledge.

48 At the risk of side-tracking a very interesting conversation (and, potentially, nit-picking), what is the evidence that the brain isn't Turing-computable? If you mean that the brain isn't a Turing machine, I agree whole-heartedly (the brain is simply an extremely powerful analog pattern recognition/storage system, with a few of those GEB:EGB loops thrown in for fun); but that is fundamentally different than saying that the processes by which the brain functions aren't Turing computable. No, in fact it's the same thing. All Turing machines are equivalent. Any Turing machine can perform the operations of any other Turing machine, regardless of the details of how they are implemented. And Turing machines aren't analog. Ever. They are purely digital. Now, a Turing machine can model an analog process, by assigning a sufficient number of significant digits to each analog property. But it can never compute the analog system, in the mathematical sense. When it comes to machine consciousness, this might well be entirely irrelevant. I think that (a) a Turing machine can be conscious and (b) a digital model of a brain can be conscious. The distinction I'm making is between modelling something and computing it.

49 Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something, then. I've always understood the term "Turing computible" to mean any operation a Turing machine can perform, not simply operations which are performed on a Turing machine. The functions of an abacus are Turing computable (as a trivial example) without requiring an abacus to be a Turing machine. So, I guess my question boils down to this - aren't, ultimately, the biochemical interactions which make up the brain computable? Actually, formulating things this way, I answer myself - the question is roughly the same as asking whether or not the universe is deterministic (that is, from exact starting conditions, is it possible to calculate the exact state, or probabilistic distribution of states, at any given time in the future, and the answer is probably no; at least, not computable in any useful sense). When it comes to machine consciousness, this might well be entirely irrelevant. I think that (a) a Turing machine can be conscious and (b) a digital model of a brain can be conscious. The distinction I'm making is between modelling something and computing it. I see your point now, and completely agree.

50 If you ask the room a question, you get back a meaningful answer; that is, after all, how Searle defined the room.

That clearly requires understanding. There is no way around this, except for redefining "understanding" in terms that deny Naturalism. Which immediately defeats the purpose.

On reflection, I think you're right. I say Searle's Room would not understand, so I agree with him there, but I also say Searle's Brain (i.e. the brain of ordinary naturalism) would not understand, for exactly the same reasons that the Room would not.

51 mitch, i am a platonian (bird view) and i think pixy is an aristotelian (frog view)...which are you?

As I recall, Tegmark introduces his two 'views' in the context of his 'reality is mathematics' theory. The birdseye view is then 'mathematics experienced from the outside', the frogseye view is 'mathematics experienced from the inside'. Even accepting Tegmark's framework, the two views are not completely disjoint, since every mathematician inhabits a particular place in the multiverse, and so is necessarily coming from a frogseye view, even when they think about things from a birdseye view. In fact, you could argue that the true birdseye view does not exist anywhere, and is at best asymptotically approximated by frogs that fly higher and higher, and see more and more of the Mindscape (to throw in a term from Rudy Rucker).

It is a risky thing to make analogies like this when you haven't really studied the original doctrines, but I might call the frogseye view Pythagorean rather than Aristotelian. Or maybe we should call these views 'Pythagorean Platonism' and 'Pythagorean Aristotelianism'. I bring up Pythagoras because he is said to have believed that 'all is number'. That would make him the original mathematical idealist.

To really discuss this properly, we would need to set aside birds, frogs, and ancient Greeks, and try to express the ideas in question plainly. Unfortunately, the modes of thought in question are simply unfamiliar to the modern mind, which is why we make allusive references to Plato and Aristotle, rather than using the correct technical vocabulary as developed by the scholastics. As for what I think, well, in this book I ran across the idea of a fundamental "exemplification relation" connecting "substance" and "property", and that would be my default position on the problem of universals (that's a very nice little book by Bertrand Russell behind the second link, incidentally), which is the technical question in metaphysics whose answer was the key issue at stake in the medieval debate. But I have beginner's agnosticism when it comes to most metaphysical questions; the whole substance-property metaphysic could be wrong, as Heidegger seems to have argued.

52 I also say Searle's Brain (i.e. the brain of ordinary naturalism) would not understand, for exactly the same reasons that the Room would not. What reasons are those? I'm really curious, not just being snarky or anything. As far as I can see, the Room understands Chinese for every meaningful definition of the word "understand".

53 The Room (or the Brain), by hypothesis, engages in conversation as if it understands. When it comes to actual understanding, I'll distinguish between three types of theory:

1. 'Understanding' is a matter of appropriate response; how this is achieved (implementation details, if you will) is irrelevant.

2. 'Understanding' exists if and only if a certain causal structure lies behind the appropriate responses.

3. 'Understanding' must be implemented in a thing called "mind" (followed by some theory of what mind is).

I think many people prefer (2) to (1) because of the possibility of implementation via Giant Look-Up Table (here's an old extropian thread on the topic). Someone like John Pollock, for example, who writes at length about the relationship between rationality and cognitive architecture. It's a little like the old distinction between knowledge and 'true belief'; you might believe the right thing for the wrong reason, in which you case you don't actually know that X, you just happen to correctly believe that X. The Lookup Table gives the right answers, but its internal representations are entirely structureless, so one might not wish to say that it understands.

However, I am staking out a variant of position (3), for the same reasons I gave when talking about color and physics. Just as the phenomenology of color tells us something about the ontology of color, there is a phenomenology of meaning and of meaning-perception that tells us something about the ontology of meaning, and I don't see anything like it in the world of particles in space. So in the debate about "naturalizing intentionality", I say yes, intentionality is the mark of the mental, and no, it does not exist in current physical ontology. However, one can certainly make a formal state-machine model of intentional processes, so intentionality can be simulated in a possible world without mind (so long as there are 'things' with 'states' and which interact in sufficiently complex ways), and it might even be simulated in a world where mind is ontologically possible, if it's implemented in the wrong way. And I think classical computation is a wrong way (for the creation of mind, anyhow), because the physical entities which constitute the computational states are not enough of a unit. Or, put another way, the only things that bind them are causal relations, and it seems to me that there are non-causal relations which play a constitutive role in mental states as well.

Quantum mechanics is of interest in this regard precisely because it has relationships like entanglement; the idea is that the complexity of entangled states may actually be a formal glimpse of fundamental intentional states. This idea has its own problems, but at least it avoids the main problem of functionalism, namely: which virtual machine is the machine whose states are the mental states? There are two sources of ambiguity here - one is the question of level (which "level of abstraction" is the right one?), the other involves the definition of the bottom level in terms of exact microphysical states, about which I say a bit here.

54 1. 'Understanding' is a matter of appropriate response; how this is achieved (implementation details, if you will) is irrelevant. Right. A functional definition; it is understanding if it acts like understanding. 2. 'Understanding' exists if and only if a certain causal structure lies behind the appropriate responses. Hmm. 3. 'Understanding' must be implemented in a thing called "mind" (followed by some theory of what mind is). Hmm. The problem with 2 & 3 is that they are purely philosophical; they don't make any difference to any goal you might wish to achieve in the real world (by definition). I think many people prefer (2) to (1) because of the possibility of implementation via Giant Look-Up Table (here's an old extropian thread on the topic). The Look-Up Table argument is nonsense, I'm afraid. The size of the lookup table grows exponentially with the length of the conversation, and the constant factor itself is enormous. Even for a very short conversation the lookup table would be larger than the known universe. It's a little like the old distinction between knowledge and 'true belief'; you might believe the right thing for the wrong reason, in which you case you don't actually know that X, you just happen to correctly believe that X. Oh, that old thing. That's a language problem and nothing else. You can know things that are false; you can know things that are true but that you reached from false data or flawed logic. Knowledge ain't what it's cracked up to be. The Lookup Table gives the right answers, but its internal representations are entirely structureless, so one might not wish to say that it understands. As I pointed out, the Lookup Table is physically impossible. What's more, it is structured, very deeply so; every possible understanding of every subject is encoded in the Table. Which is clearly also nonsense. However, I am staking out a variant of position (3), for the same reasons I gave when talking about color and physics. Well, we already established that this doesn't work for colour. Just as the phenomenology of color tells us something about the ontology of color It does? What? there is a phenomenology of meaning and of meaning-perception that tells us something about the ontology of meaning, and I don't see anything like it in the world of particles in space. Fallacy of Division. Meaning is information. Information is a purely physical property. So in the debate about "naturalizing intentionality", I say yes, intentionality is the mark of the mental, and no, it does not exist in current physical ontology. Intention is an information process. Information is physical. However, one can certainly make a formal state-machine model of intentional processes Indeed, I do exactly that every day. It's what I get paid for. so intentionality can be simulated in a possible world without mind Eh? (so long as there are 'things' with 'states' and which interact in sufficiently complex ways) and it might even be simulated in a world where mind is ontologically possible, if it's implemented in the wrong way. How can there be a "wrong" way? And I think classical computation is a wrong way (for the creation of mind, anyhow), because the physical entities which constitute the computational states are not enough of a unit. But you have never shown any valid reason for thinking that. Or, put another way, the only things that bind them are causal relations, and it seems to me that there are non-causal relations which play a constitutive role in mental states as well. Quantum Mechanics? That's not impossible; but we have no reason for thinking that it is true. There is nothing that we observe of brain or mind that behaves as though acausal effects were involved. There's no reason to believe that QM is involved other than statistically, because the brain doesn't do anything QM-ish. Quantum mechanics is of interest in this regard precisely because it has relationships like entanglement; the idea is that the complexity of entangled states may actually be a formal glimpse of fundamental intentional states. No. Entanglement doesn't bear any relationship to intentionality. This is just magic fairy thinking again. Take one thing you don't understand and explain it with some other thing you don't understand. The problem isn't that you don't understand either subject; the problem is that the only reason you are linking them together is that you don't understand either one. This idea has its own problems, but at least it avoids the main problem of functionalism, namely: which virtual machine is the machine whose states are the mental states? That's not a problem at all. Each level of the multi-layered machine that is the brain is the level whose states are mental states. Describe it in terms of quantum mechanics or biochemistry or cell functions; it's the right level. It's just the description that varies. Mind is biology is chemistry is physics. But for specific questions, it's much easier to focus your attention on a particular level in the stack. That is, after all, why we have those levels - they are more convenient models for specific classes of problem.

55 I'd better just describe a specific scenario, and then we can see how the philosophy looks. In the terms of your forum essay, it would be a monadological information idealism: a CA in which the cell states are not just generic information states, but full-fledged intentional states, at least some of the time. One should also envision the causal grid (both connectivity and cell population) as dynamical: cells can engage in relative motion, as changes in connectivity change their separation within the grid. This is like the Machian interpretation of general relativity, in which only matter exists, and space is a relational property. Finally, in conceiving of the state of a cell, one should think of a recursive data type like a tree, rather than a structure with a fixed number of arguments. In such a universe, one might implement a binary tree using several fundamental cells in simple states, but this would be ontologically different from a single fundamental cell which was directly in a tree state. In such a theory, state machines get to have genuine intentionality only if they are single fundamental cells. Otherwise, it's just a simulation. The property of "being a fundamental tree state" and the property of "being a tree state of a set of fundamental cells" are different things, and it approximates what I mean by the difference between mind and the simulation of mind.

1 stupid--> http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/111366.php

2 Yep, that's stupid all right. It's one of Rusty's guest posters, though; Rusty himself is rather more sensible.

3 I'm confused. Do you mean it still holds true when the labels "Group A" and "Group B" are reversed, or when the labels "evil" and "stupid" are reversed? I'm assuming the latter, but my low intellect perceives the original statement ambiguously.

4 A & B. In other words, stupidity is far more common than evil.

5 Ah. I thought the principle was "people who think other people are evil tend to be stupid", but your interpretation makes more sense.

6 That's because evil is stupid. You can use the commutative property to do the math.

1 Um, I thought that August was the height of winter for y'all. Isn't it like a snowstorm in the American Southeast - relatively rare, but not unthinkable?

2 Um, yeah.

3 Global Warming strikes again!!!

4 Snow? In August? Sounds like Minnesota to me...

5 LOL! I love that caption!

6 Rather, "snow" news day.

1 Also, a great Stevie Wonder song. Y'know, for what it's worth. :-D

2 That's "Superstition," Tommy. But you're right, it's a great song.

3 Ack, ya caught me. I knew something didn't quite sound right there. :-D

4 Yeah. "Suuuupernatural ain't the waaaayyyayayayaay..." Nope, just don't work.

1 All scientific theories permit creation of negative predictions: "It is impossible that ... will happen." If a theory cannot formulate negative predictions, then that theory is not science.

2 Yep.

3 So how does Naturalism explain scientific theories? That is, assuming Naturalism is correct, what is the explanation for the existence of beings who can formulate judgements such as "It is impossible that ... will happen", which are reliable?

4 So how does Naturalism explain scientific theories? It doesn't. Naturalism is a metaphysical framework (one of many) that is unique in that it makes Science possible. Naturalism, in itself, doesn't explain anything. That is, assuming Naturalism is correct, what is the explanation for the existence of beings who can formulate judgements such as "It is impossible that ... will happen", which are reliable? If you are asking Why do thinking creatures exist?, then the answer under Naturalism is Wrong question. Naturalism isn't about Why, it's about What and How.

5 I was mystified by Michael's question. Why should sapience be mysterious under a naturalist outlook? Then I realized that Michael has an a priori assumption of mind-body duality. Under a naturalist view of the universe, sapience is simply an emergent property of brain tissue. As such, there's no contradiction between a naturalist viewpoint and the existence of intelligences sufficiently sophisticated as to be able to ask these kinds of questions.

6 Something a lot of ID people don't realize is that the weak anthropic principle makes the unlikelihood of man's evolution a moot point. In order for intelligent life to be asking the question of how intelligent life occurred, intelligent life had to first occur. It's like showing up at a lottery winner's convention and being surprised by the fact everyone in the room won the lottery. Winning the lottery is improbable, but the improbable event was a requirement of being in the room.

7 Well, no, Mr. den Beste; I don't believe in mind-body duality as an a priori assumption. I believe it because no explanation of sapience as "an emergent property of brain tissue" covers the facts of sapience as we know them to be -- in particular, the fact that sapient beings can construct scientific theories, can judge that some types of events can never happen. Supposing Naturalism is true, whenever a sapient being makes a scientific judgement, the causes of that judgement must all be found in the material universe. (This holds because the judgement is an event in that universe.) The trouble is that a scientific judgement is also a statement about the universe, and has value only so far as it is true. And if a sapient being's judgements are solely the result of material causes, which is to say, of deterministic laws applied to random movements of particles -- then how can they also be the result of logical reasoning applied to evidence? If material causes fully account for judgements, their truth, being an immaterial cause, does not affect them; and therefore they are without value. And Pixy -- the question I asked wasn't Why sapience exists, but How it can exist, and What kind of thing it is. A Naturalist can't deny that those are valid questions, but can a Naturalist answer them? And I may as well start another hare: exactly what negative predictions are made by evolutionary theory? What sets of events does evolution say are impossible?

8 Supposing Naturalism is true, whenever a sapient being makes a scientific judgement, the causes of that judgement must all be found in the material universe. Naturalism says that all causes are Natural.. The trouble is that a scientific judgement is also a statement about the universe, and has value only so far as it is true. It has value in as much as it accurately represents the universe. And if a sapient being's judgements are solely the result of material causes, which is to say, of deterministic laws applied to random movements of particles -- then how can they also be the result of logical reasoning applied to evidence? When you say "deterministic laws applied to random movements of particles", you expose a deep confusion over the nature of the material universe. Certain quantum events are random; this much is true. The definition of random must be understood, though. We cannot predict, even in principle, when a single radioactive atom will decay. However, for a given isotope, the chance it will decay in any given time period is very precisely fixed. All random quantum events are like that; we can assign well-defined probabilities to all the possible movements or changes. Because of this, the statistical behaviour of matter on larger scales is extremely well defined. The brain appears to operate on that level, as do computers. Quantum randomness has little to do with the process. If material causes fully account for judgements, their truth, being an immaterial cause, does not affect them; and therefore they are without value. That doesn't make any sense at all. Truth is not a cause of any sort, material or immaterial. Truth is a desirable outcome; that's all. We make observations, we build hypotheses to explain those observations, and we test those hypotheses with further observations. And Pixy -- the question I asked wasn't Why sapience exists, but How it can exist That question is also meaningless. Try rephrasing it again. and What kind of thing it is. It's a material process. The evidence for this is quite direct from our observation of the matieral basis for thought (the brain). A Naturalist can't deny that those are valid questions, but can a Naturalist answer them? They aren't well-formed scientific questions, that much is certain. You don't seem to have the knack. And I may as well start another hare: exactly what negative predictions are made by evolutionary theory? What sets of events does evolution say are impossible? It says, to make a specific example, that you will not find hominid fossils in Silurian strata. While you will not always find all the transitional fossils to show how a given species evolved, there will be antecedents. It says that molecular and fossil evidence will support one another, with differences amounting to fine tuning. If you studied the genetic material of horses and could show that they were more closely related to water cress than to other mammals, that would falsify evolution. Evolution predicts that horses will be genetically to other mammals, and predicts that you won't find glaring counter-examples. And here's the point: We've made an IMMENSE number of observations and tests of this, and Evolution has passed every time. It's as well-tested as Relativity or Quantum Mechanics. None of these three theories explain everything, even within their own domains, but there is no question but that they are essentially sound.

9 what negative predictions are made by evolutionary theory? What sets of events does evolution say are impossible? It is impossible that a large number of species in the same ecosystem each have entirely different and unrelated mappings of RNA codon triples to amino acids. (In point of fact, every species ever studied uses exactly the same mapping.)

10 The tools of functional NMR and positron emittion tomography are rapidly expanding our knowledge of consciouness, memory, and "thought". If these are the central components of sapience, then we have at least a rudimentary understanding of them now, and can expect that knowledge to increase exponentially in the years to come. The mechanism by which an organic brain stores information is one of the coolest things I can think of, no pun intended.

11 Why did my comment just now end up in the "hold for approval" queue?

12 And Pixy -- the question I asked wasn't Why sapience exists, but How it can exist That question is also meaningless. Try rephrasing it again. This reminds me of a quote that was the foreword in a Stross book. "To me, asking the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than asking whether a submarine can swim." A thermostat exhibits the most basic tenet of sapience response to stimuli. Sapience is no great trick, really, just a very very complicated interrelationship of billions of little thermostats responding to billions of stimuli every microsecond.

13 Steven - It's a "feature" of Movable Type 3.1. I haven't been able to work out what critera it uses, but it does it to me as well.

14 The tools of functional NMR and positron emittion tomography are rapidly expanding our knowledge of consciouness, memory, and "thought". This is true, but the material origin of thought can be demonstrated with much simpler tools... Like, say, a baseball bat.

15

Pixy: The details of how quantum mechanics generates quasi-deterministic results aren't germane to my argument; the key question is, "if a sapient being's judgements are solely the result of material causes ... then how can they also be the result of logical reasoning applied to evidence?" The comparison of humans to computers may illustrate the point. The execution of a computer program is the result of material causes (electrical power, the design of the circuits, the state of the memory devices) and is fully explained by them. And this means the computer's final state is absolutely determined by its initial state -- it cannot calculate any result except the one implied by the information given it. It cannot, in particular, recognize that the algorithm guiding the course of the execution is unsound. There's no gap left over in which logical reasoning from evidence could possibly influence the execution's result. (Nor, in a computer, would you want any such gap to exist!)

Now, under the assumption that human brains are only computers, we would have to admit that human judgements are results of some program's execution, from which it follows that such judgements are wholly determined by some initial state -- present perceptions, memories of past perceptions, etc. And it equally follows that logical reasoning has no influence over human judgements; and if the algorithm which gives rise to judgements is unsound, the human making a judgement could never discover it. Are you prepared to accept those propositions?

Passing to another point: would you agree that the question "how can carbon nuclei be generated within stars in great numbers" is meaningless? For if you did, you would have dismissed Fred Hoyle's speculation (later confirmed) that the carbon nucleus has a specific energy level.

I have always supposed that questions of the form "here is ...; how can it exist?" are exactly those that science is best equipped to answer.

Neal: don't jump too soon to the conclusion that the neuroscientists are looking at all the components of sapience. I recommend to you the work of David Chalmers on consciousness.

16 It cannot, in particular, recognize that the algorithm guiding the course of the execution is unsound. Computers are perfectly capable of examining their own programming, or of applying more than one method to the input data and comparing the results. So your statement is utterly false, and any conclusions you might draw from it are baseless. A given program may or may not be able to determine its own reliability, but if it gets wrong answers, and attempts to apply those answers in the real world, it will fail (one way or another). The same, of course, applies to brains. Passing to another point: would you agree that the question "how can carbon nuclei be generated within stars in great numbers" is meaningless? It's not a well-formed scientific question. Ask rather How are carbon nuclei formed within stars? Or more simply, How are carbon nuclei formed? I have always supposed that questions of the form "here is ...; how can it exist?" are exactly those that science is best equipped to answer. No. "How can it exist?" as framed is a question of metaphysics. "Where did it come from?" is a scientific question. I recommend to you the work of David Chalmers on consciousness. David Chalmers is a fruit bat. His work on consciousness is worse than useless. In particular, his "hard-problem consciousness" is complete drivel. "Why", he asks, "is the system that performs these functions conscious?" Wrong question. Chalmers: "Perhaps accounts of this kind can tell us about the neurophysiological or information-processing *correlates* of conscious experience. This is useful, but the correlation itself remains unexplained: why does the physical process give rise to experience at all? These are simply the wrong *type* of methods to answer this question." That's because you're asking an unscientific question and looking at scientific answers. Dumbass. Once again: Computer programs are quite commonly introspective, to various degrees, examining aspects of their own internal models and adjusting themselves accordingly. They do this because it is useful. I'd suggest reading Daniel Dennett. He's far from perfect, but at least his work has some basis in reality.

17 In fact, this is particularly apropos, because Chalmers is to neuroscience what Intelligent Design is to evolutionary theory. The arguments are identical: "You can't explain this to my satisfaction, therefor magic fairies did it." However, the IDists at least point out real gaps in the fossil record; Chalmers merely highlights the flaws of his own assumptions.

18 So (finally), to answer Chalmer's question: Why is the system that performs these functions conscious? Utility.

19 Computers are perfectly capable of examining their own programming, or of applying more than one method to the input data and comparing the results.

This is true only for programs on the "application" level. I was thinking more of circuitry errors like the Intel Pentium's division error, or security holes in an OS's kernel. Errors on that level aren't things a computer can fix by itself.

And you haven't given an answer to this bit: "under the assumption that human brains are only computers, we would have to admit that human judgements are results of some program's execution, from which it follows that such judgements are wholly determined by some initial state ... it equally follows that logical reasoning has no influence over human judgements". Is there really nothing in that which strikes you as objectionable?

20 This is true only for programs on the "application" level. I was thinking more of circuitry errors like the Intel Pentium's division error, or security holes in an OS's kernel. Errors on that level aren't things a computer can fix by itself. Yes they are. The OS kernel is just another application. Hardware is trickier, but that's akin to brain surgery rather than self-awareness, so the point is moot. "under the assumption that human brains are only computers, we would have to admit that human judgements are results of some program's execution, from which it follows that such judgements are wholly determined by some initial state ... it equally follows that logical reasoning has no influence over human judgements" No. There are three factors: The initial state. The process. The data being input. The process is the logic, and it is only one of the parts. Of course, you can't reset a brain the way you can a regular computer, so the initial state is not well defined. I'll ignore that for now, because you're wrong anyway. What's more, brains don't run programs, and don't necessarily use algorithms. (Algorithms are only one model of computing, and are not the one brains are most suited to.) Is there really nothing in that which strikes you as objectionable? Sure. It's completely wrong in every way.

21 I don't suppose that it's worth pointing out that the human brain is not isomorphic to a Turing Machine? In other words, it is not a "computer", in the technical sense of the term. It cannot be simulated by a Turing Machine, and mathematical proofs of uncomputability based on isomorphism to the "stopping problem" don't apply to the human brain. There are several reasons why neural systems are not "computers": neural systems are asynchronous, neural systems are fundamentally analog, and neural systems are not 100% deterministic in execution. (Also, behavior of neural systems is influenced not only by signal inputs, but also by such factors as fatigue, nutrition, genetics, blood hormone levels, and what other information has been processed recently -- and is being processed simultaneously, since neural systems never work on only one problem at a time.) Thus any attempt to map concepts from computer science to neuroscience is fraught with conceptual pitfalls, because those concepts may apply only partially, and may not apply at all. ...under the assumption that human brains are only computers, we would have to admit that human judgements are results of some program's execution, from which it follows that such judgements are wholly determined by some initial state -- present perceptions, memories of past perceptions, etc. Since human brains are not computers, this entire argument is irrelevant.

22 Well, Turing Machines are physically impossible, so the fact that the brain isn't one is not much of a surprise. Computer science can provide insights into how certain things might be possible, and computer science does study neural networks as well as conventional algorithmic systems. Whether human brains are computers depends on your definition of "computer", but we can infer from Michael's statements that under his definition, they aren't.

23 I had intended the comparison between computers and brains as an illustration, not as the core of the argument, and once again what I regard as the core has been missed. Entirely my fault, of course. Let me see if I can phrase it properly this time. I'll start from this remark:

There are several reasons why neural systems are not "computers": neural systems are asynchronous, neural systems are fundamentally analog, and neural systems are not 100% deterministic in execution. (Also, behavior of neural systems is influenced not only by signal inputs, but also by such factors as fatigue, nutrition, genetics, blood hormone levels, and what other information has been processed recently -- and is being processed simultaneously, since neural systems never work on only one problem at a time.)

All of these outside influences, as well as the neural connections and signals, are material things; in principle, if we had a complete and detailed description of the brain at a specified time, and all the outside influences on the brain starting at that time, we could give an equally complete and detailed description of the brain at any future time. (Or, if quantum effects are relevant, we could give an ensemble of possible descriptions. I doubt this makes a difference to the argument.)

At some level of abstraction, there are events in any human brain which we call judgements; and these are supposed to be the conclusions, by a logical process of reasoning, from collections of evidence. Now, under the assumption of Naturalism judgements, like all other events, are only the results of material causes -- indeed, they are wholly composed of, and reducible to, events listed in one of the complete and detailed descriptions of the brain in which they occur. And the problem is, if this is the case, it does not seem possible for judgements to be, in addition, conclusions of an argument.

The form of a judgement is fully explained by the material events which are its constituents and the causes of those events, and logical reasoning is not one of those causes. Decompose a judgement down to the states of elementary particles; you will not find arguments or inferences. Trace back the changes of state that gave rise to the judgement; again you will not find arguments or inferences. And Naturalism admits no other kind of cause. So how is a judgement supposed to represent any aspect of reality, except itself? How does a judgement, under Naturalism, manage to be true, or false; or have any meaning at all?

In a word: is there a consistent epistemology of Naturalism?

24 I had intended the comparison between computers and brains as an illustration, not as the core of the argument Sure, and I took it as such, and you're still wrong. The differences between brains and computers are important to remember, but they aren't the key to the fallacy of your argument. if quantum effects are relevant, we could give an ensemble of possible descriptions Quantum effects are inescapable, but we don't know to what degree they are significant here. Chaos theory is also relevant, however, and the result is that what you are suggesting is quite impossible. Sorry. At some level of abstraction, there are events in any human brain which we call judgements; and these are supposed to be the conclusions, by a logical process of reasoning, from collections of evidence. Correct. Now, under the assumption of Naturalism judgements, like all other events, are only the results of material causes Correct. -- indeed, they are wholly composed of, and reducible to, events listed in one of the complete and detailed descriptions of the brain in which they occur. Which sadly cannot exist, but again, this is not the key to the problem. And the problem is, if this is the case, it does not seem possible for judgements to be, in addition, conclusions of an argument. Nonsense. The brain applies transformations (limited by the laws of physics) to its sensory input and its memories. The output of this process includes judgements of the nature of the sensory data it has received. There is no difficulty here. The form of a judgement is fully explained by the material events which are its constituents and the causes of those events, and logical reasoning is not one of those causes. Logical reasoning is the process. It doesn't need to be a cause. You're looking at the wrong level of abstraction. You're seeing lots of dots, but no picture. Decompose a judgement down to the states of elementary particles; you will not find arguments or inferences. Yes. That's because you've decomposed it. Decompose an apple down to its component molecules and you don't have an apple any more. This is the Logical Fallacy of Division. Trace back the changes of state that gave rise to the judgement; again you will not find arguments or inferences. Yes you will. You just have to examine it at the right level of abstraction. And the mind has many levels of abstraction. So of course do computers. Arguments and inferences do not have any existence of themselves; they have to be represented. Computers and brains form representations of these (and other concepts) and manipulate them. They do this in different ways, but they perform the same fundamental task. How does a judgement, under Naturalism, manage to be true, or false; or have any meaning at all? Insofar as it is a valid statement about reality. Which can be judged by testing it against reality. In a word: is there a consistent epistemology of Naturalism? In a word: Yes.

25 All of these outside influences, as well as the neural connections and signals, are material things; in principle, if we had a complete and detailed description of the brain at a specified time, and all the outside influences on the brain starting at that time, we could give an equally complete and detailed description of the brain at any future time. (Or, if quantum effects are relevant, we could give an ensemble of possible descriptions. I doubt this makes a difference to the argument.) To which Pixy responds: Chaos theory is also relevant, however, and the result is that what you are suggesting is quite impossible. Quite so, and the reason is the Butterfly Effect: initial errors in specifying the state of the system, no matter how small, cascade and accumulate in the predictive process, and beyond a certain time horizon lead the prediction to bear essentially no resemblance to the real system, rendering the prediction completely useless. The Butterfly Effect is a profound result of Chaos Theory. In this case what it means is that the "ensemble of possible descriptions" must necessarily include the entire possible outcome space -- which is to say, it won't actually permit a prediction because it can't exclude anything.

26 Michael, the fundamental flaw of your argument is that you implicitly deny the existence of emergent properties. Stripped to its core, your argument is the following: 1. Atoms cannot think. 2. Brains composed of atoms therefore cannot think. 3. We know that thought exists. 4. Therefore thought must take place in some way which is not a reflection of the physical matter of the brain. 5. Thus the mind is not the same as the brain, and we have proved essentialism and mind-body duality. The problem with your argument is step 2, because it requires that the brain not exhibit any properties that cannot be demonstrated in its component parts (ultimate, the atoms that make it up). And the reason that step 2 is invalid is because of emergent properties. They're an observable fact; emergent properties do exist. Systems engineers (like me) deal with them all the time; in a sense "systems engineering" is precisely the study of emergent properties, because the only reasonable definition of "system" I've ever come up with is "a collection of components which, when interacting, demonstrate emergent properties". The following argument is invalid: "None of the components of the system have thus-and-so property, therefore the system itself cannot have thus-and-so property." That isn't a valid inference; the system may well have emergent properties which are not characteristics of any of the components. (And you cannot necessarily learn anything about the emergent properties of a system through detailed examination of the components. That's pretty close to the first practical lesson that systems engineers learn.) That's where your argument fails: At some level of abstraction, there are events in any human brain which we call judgements; and these are supposed to be the conclusions, by a logical process of reasoning, from collections of evidence. Now, under the assumption of Naturalism judgements, like all other events, are only the results of material causes -- indeed, they are wholly composed of, and reducible to, events listed in one of the complete and detailed descriptions of the brain in which they occur. And the problem is, if this is the case, it does not seem possible for judgements to be, in addition, conclusions of an argument. "wholly composed of" DOES NOT IMPLY "reducible to". The properties of the system are not necessarily all present in the components. Thus to argue about whether those properties are present in the components is irrelevant to whether those properties are present in the system. And that's why your entire argument collapses.

27 Um, I hate to inject in the middle of this learned discourse, but why are Turing machines impossible? And why is a complete and detailed description of the working state of a brain impossible? [Certainly, it's impossible with our current level of technology].

28 The Turing Machine is a mathematical concept, not a practical one. It requires an infinitely long tape, and it must be perfectly reliable. Very useful for testing out ideas of what is and isn't computable, but not something you'd try to build. It may be possible to come up with a "good enough" description of the working state of the brain; I think this is likely. What Michael was suggesting is that we could then use that to predict future brain states; we can't, because the brain is (a) too complicated and (b) too sensitive to variations in the initial state. That's where Chaos Theory (the Butterfly Effect) comes into it.

29 owlish, Alan Turing himself questioned Turing computability. perhaps michael needs an oracle machine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine

I personally like Sir Roger's take. Penrose proposes that the physiological process underlying a given thought may initially involve a number of superposed quantum states, each of which performs a calculation of sorts. When the differences in the distribution of mass and energy between the states reach a gravitationally significant level, the states collapse into a single state, causing measurable and possibly nonlocal changes in the neural structure of the brain. This physical event correlates with a mental one: the comprehension of a mathematical theorem, say, or the decision not to tip a waiter.

30 Personally I loathe Penrose's take. It's the same argument, again, as Intelligent Design and Chalmers' "Hard Problem Consciousness", though at least Penrose names his magic fairies. There is no physical evidence that what Penrose is suggesting is even possible, and certainly no reason to suspect that it is necessary.

31 Personally, I believe in magic fairies. ;)

32 Well, yes, but not inside my brain. :p

33 Turing computability is a very powerful mathematical tool, but its limits have to be understood. The fact that a given calculation cannot be completed by a Turing machine in finite time doesn't imply that it cannot be computed by anything at all. The classic demonstration of that is calculating the square root of 2. Since the square root of 2 is an irrational number, an exact calculation of it would require an infinite number of bits, and therefore would require an infinite amount of time to calculate. But an ideal straight edge and compass can "calculate" the square root of 2 in a relatively small number of steps. Given two marks on a line which define a line segment of length "1", then draw a perpendicular line through one of those two marks and place a mark "1" away from the original line on the new line. Then draw the diagonal. The length of the diagonal has a length equal to the square root of 2. (Note that this applies to an ideal compass and an ideal straight edge, which means that the line is infinitely narrow, and measurements are perfectly reproducible, etc.) The reason is that calculations performed with a straight edge and a compass are not isomorphic to a Turing Machine, and thus are not bound by the limits of a Turing Machine.

34 oh, pixy, Sir Roger does not even call his objective orchestrated reduction model a theory, yet. how can you equivalence quantum consciousness with ID? what if tomorrow we discover Higgs bosuns at the large haldron super collidor? There is a vast difference between quantum consciousness and ID--and it is called mathematics. and susie, i also believe in magic fairies. ;-)

35 how can you equivalence quantum consciousness with ID? The same principle applies: "You can't explain this to my satisfaction, therefor magic fairies did it." Penrose's magic fairies are some sort of quantum gravity effects; as I said, there is no reason to think that anything of the sort plays any part in brain function; nor is anything of the sort required to explain brain function. Higgs bosons make no difference one way or the other. There is a vast difference between quantum consciousness and ID--and it is called mathematics. IDists use mathematics to "prove" their points too. But they, like Penrose, are using numbers that have no bearing on the problem.

36 Pixy, Higgs bosons (if they exist) are a step in proving Penrose's magic fairies.

IDist's do not use use mathematics, in the sense that i understand mathematics. the complexity argument is bogus as applied to ID. and, ID has already lost the memetic war against evolution, if you look at public opinion. we should go on to more interesting arguments.

the real difference between quantum theorists and IDist's, is that ID is desperately trying to cling to something from our past, and quantum theorists are thinking about something in our future. Penrose et al are the new heretics, metaphysicists like Newton and Leibnitz were in their time. they may, indeed, be wrong. but at least they are not afraid to think outside the box.

37 Pixy, your flame wars are much too civilized.

38 Got it. Thanks. And obviously, the magic faeries work for His Noodly Greatness, giving meatballs to good little children and destroying bad little children with quantum singularities. :)

39 Pixy, Higgs bosons (if they exist) are a step in proving Penrose's magic fairies. No they're not. The Higgs bosons (if the exist) help us understand why matter has mass. Penrose's ideas on consciousness are bollocks. Higgs bosons or no, his idea has no merit, and it's still "magic fairy" thinking. And it's counter to several thousand years of collected evidence that consciousness is a product of biochemistry. There's no evidence that what Penrose suggests is posible; there's no evidence to suggest that it is necessary; and there's a billion tons of evidence to suggest that it's utter nonsense. The magic fairies may be couched in terms of theoretical physics, but magic fairies is what they are.

40 oh! thanx wonderduck-- i almost forgot to comment on the anime thread! pixy, i am going to go gather escalation material--this flame war is heating up. ;-)

41 No problem. I've argued these points before on various web forums (JREF and Internet Infidels, for example). The problem there was that the people I was arguing with were complete idiots. This isn't the case here. I disagree with you and Michael, but you are both able to put forward a coherent argument. (In one previous discussion I had an opponent claim that logic had no place in debate. Seriously.)

42 but pixy, are we really arguing? isn't the bio-electro-chemical aggregate we know as personality or soul formed of some underlying elements, like say.....matter and energy? ;-)

43 isn't the bio-electro-chemical aggregate we know as personality or soul formed of some underlying elements, like say.....matter and energy? Sure. But that's not what Penrose is saying.

44 hmmm...i thought Penrose was saying we need something extra to understand the non-computability of conscious thought....what do you think he is saying? perhaps i should call for backup....but there is always the problem that my backup may take pixy's side. ;-)

45 pixy, what do you think of this? http://www.techcentralstation.com/081005A.html

46 i thought Penrose was saying we need something extra to understand the non-computability of conscious thought Yes. And there is no reason to believe this is the case, and there is no reason to believe that his alternative explanation is possible at all. He's a good mathematical physicist, but he knows absolutely nothing about brain function.

47 What I think of that article is this: As soon as you step into theology, you can forget about anything making sense. Theology doesn't. It's just an attempt to rationalise the irrational. I do like the term deus absconditus though.

48 I've just enabled TypeKey logins. I don't like TypeKey much, but it's better than having to manually approve every comment on a thread like this.

49 testing........

50 I think it worked!

51 Pixy, then you believe all thought is Turing computable? I thought Den Beste-sama just proved it is not.

Doesn't there have to be an interface between biology and mathematics somewhere? Is that interface physics?

I like Max Tegmark quite a lot too. "In other words, our successful theories are not mathematics approximating physics, but mathematics approximating mathematics."

52 Actually, what Steven pointed out is that it's irrelevant whether thought is Turing computable or not (for this purpose) because the brain is not a Turing machine. I haven't read Tegmark, but I'll look him up.

53 You step away from a discussion for a few days, and look at what happens...

About Penrose. We need to distinguish between his various speculations. His ideas on objective state reduction as part of a theory of quantum gravity come from attempts to integrate quantum mechanics and general relativity, theories which (though confirmed separately by hosts of evidence) are not compatible as they stand. The quantum gravity hypotheses, that is, are answers to a question posed within physics.

Penrose's argument against "strong AI" comes out of the foundations of mathematics and the theory of computation; it exploits, that is, the results of Goedel, Turing, Church, and Tarski. And the speculations on consciousness depend on that argument and the quantum gravity hypotheses, plus some interesting experimental data.

... it's counter to several thousand years of collected evidence that consciousness is a product of biochemistry.

There's several thousand years of evidence that biochemistry is necessary to human consciousness. Not a shred of it is evidence that biochemistry suffices, which is the question at hand.

Michael, the fundamental flaw of your argument is that you implicitly deny the existence of emergent properties.

Actually, no, I don't deny the existence of emergent properties; what I deny is that the completion of a judgement can be an emergent property of matter. Unfortunately I haven't time just now to state my reasons properly, but as a hint: if the components of a system all have a property X, and all the available ways to combine components preserve X, then the system as a whole must have X. That rule of inference is called "structural induction".

54 There's several thousand years of evidence that biochemistry is necessary to human consciousness. Not a shred of it is evidence that biochemistry suffices, which is the question at hand. We haven't shown that biochemistry suffices; this is true. To do that we need an operational theory of consicousness, something we don't have. What it does show is that all competing theories are bunk, and that biochemistry is entirely plausible. The evidence comes not only from the fact that chemicals in the bloodstream can directly and predictably effect consciousness, but from the way they do so. Consciousness acts in all ways as though it were being produced by the biochemistry and electrochemistry of the brain. We can't explain exactly how, but that's no reason to introduce magic fairies. Unfortunately I haven't time just now to state my reasons properly We'll wait. if the components of a system all have a property X, and all the available ways to combine components preserve X, then the system as a whole must have X. That rule of inference is called "structural induction". Which is nice, but in no way addresses the point. Emergent properties are ones where the system has property X, but the components do not. Emergent properties are real, and you have shown not a shred of evidence that judgement cannot be one of them. And we can show that things that outwardly look remarkably like judgement can be produced as emergent properties of computer programs. So why not the brain?

55 Hello, I'm back again!

As I said before, I don't deny that emergent properties exist; in fact I can supply an example which the article I just linked to missed -- natural languages emerge, in exactly this sense, from human communities. But let us analyze the examples of emergence more closely.

The pressure and temperature of a gas emerge from the energy and momentum of the gas' constituent molecules; but pressure and temperature are defined in terms of the energy and momentum of the gas as a whole. Market prices regulate the use of goods and services in an economy, without need for a single director; but those prices, which summarize recent transactions, emerge by means of a host of attempted transactions. Languages, which regulate communications among the members of a community, normally emerge from and by means of people's attempts to communicate with each other.

The common thread is, I trust, clear: in each case the macro-scale emergent structure is of the same category as the micro-scale events from which it emerges. And this holds for every emergent property. So, if judgements are to be emergent properties, we must find some micro-scale events, of the same category as judgements but less structured, out of which a judgement could emerge.

Now there is a plausible candidate for this in perception -- which I define as recognition, by a sapient being, that some other event not only has occurred, but has significance. The trouble is that Naturalism denies any significance to the idea of significance. The suggestion that an event means, as well as occurs, is metaphysical, beyond the limits of science, therefore (to the Naturalist) without explanatory power. So Naturalists cannot appeal to perception as the ground of judgements.

To restate: the problem for the Naturalist is not to explain how the orderly structure of a scientific judgement emerges from a chaos, but to characterize the chaos from which a judgement emerges, without admitting the existence of immaterial entities.

And we can show that things that outwardly look remarkably like judgement can be produced as emergent properties of computer programs.

To the best of my knowledge, the two types of programs which come closest to performing judgements are heuristic-guided search and data mining. Neither of these really resembles the method of reasoning that scientists actually employ; and more importantly, the part of human reasoning they do resemble is the "emergent" aspect, bringing chaos into order, which is not where the difficulty lies.

56 Welcome back! You might want to drop in on the God's Gift to Neuroscience thread, where we are discussing beer and Penrose's speculations on the origins of consciousness in quantum gravity fluctuations. (I think Penrose is nuts wrong.) Anyhow: So, if judgements are to be emergent properties, we must find some micro-scale events, of the same category as judgements but less structured, out of which a judgement could emerge. Easily done. Judgements are information processing. All interactions involve the processing of information. That's your category right there. The trouble is that Naturalism denies any significance to the idea of significance. This is true (if you define your terms carefully), but in exactly the same way, Naturalism denies any significance to the idea of judgement. So your argument fails; insignificant perception can perfectly well give rise to insignifcant judgement. To restate: the problem for the Naturalist is not to explain how the orderly structure of a scientific judgement emerges from a chaos, but to characterize the chaos from which a judgement emerges, without admitting the existence of immaterial entities. There simply isn't a problem. You think there is a problem because you are importing a concept of judgement that simply doesn't apply under Naturalism. This sort of thing is universal among philosophers who try to find fault with Naturalism, so there's no need to be embarassed. Many thousands of pages of argument have been published with the same central flaw. Neither of these really resembles the method of reasoning that scientists actually employ; and more importantly, the part of human reasoning they do resemble is the "emergent" aspect, bringing chaos into order, which is not where the difficulty lies. There is no difficulty. The output of such a computer program can look exactly like a human judgement, given an appropriate program and class of problem. (That's based on real, working programs available today, not on information-processing theoreticals.) If you can't distinguish between machine generated "judgement" and human Judgement, you simply have no basis on which to argue that they are not equivalent. The only thing you are left with is a "Judgement of the Gaps" argument: That Significant Judgement is whatever has not already been demonstrated to be Turing-computable. Trust me, you don't want to go there.

57 The common thread is, I trust, clear: in each case the macro-scale emergent structure is of the same category as the micro-scale events from which it emerges. And this holds for every emergent property. I'm afraid not. Take, for example, oscillation. Some systems oscillate, but there's no characteristic of the components which has anything to do with oscillation. Oscillation is an emergent property of the system which corresponds to no "microscale event". One NOT-gate doesn't inherently oscillate. Two NOT-gates wired input-to-output oscillate like crazy. Market prices regulate the use of goods and services in an economy, without need for a single director; but those prices, which summarize recent transactions, emerge by means of a host of attempted transactions. If two people engage in a transaction, that is a system and the transaction is an emergent property of that system. All you've proved is that sometimes the emergent properties of large systems are imperfectly reflected in the emergent properties of small systems. One person is not a system (at least for purposes of this particular discussion, because one person cannot engage in meaningful transactions). What is the "microscale event" in a single person which corresponds to market pricing? There is none.

58 ok pixy, you have proven that biochemistry is neccessary, but you have not proven that it is sufficient. can you do that proof?

59

Judgements are information processing. All interactions involve the processing of information. That's your category right there.

This would be satisfactory, if you had defined "information" as a result of material causes. However, as far as I am aware "information" belongs to the same family as "significance", "meaning", and "purpose". Which is to say, information is exactly what Naturalism excludes from the set of admissible causes of events: a non-material phenomenon. By making information processing a universal law, you have in effect declared that elementary particles think, and endorsed the ideas of Chalmers and Penrose.

You think there is a problem because you are importing a concept of judgement that simply doesn't apply under Naturalism.

Why yes, I am. Except that it's not a "concept" of judgement I'm appealing to; it's the thing itself, the experience of reaching a judgment, which every human being shares to some extent, of which the scientific method is a refinement. Saying that judgement as we experience it "doesn't apply under Naturalism" is just like saying the orbit of Mercury isn't what astronomers observe it to be, because Newton's theory of gravity would put it somewhere else.

60

Some systems oscillate, but there's no characteristic of the components which has anything to do with oscillation. Oscillation is an emergent property of the system which corresponds to no "microscale event".

Ah ... oscillation of what? You mention logic gates -- there, what oscillates is the voltage passing through the wires that connect the gates, correct? And voltage in a wire is certainly a characteristic of a component of the logic circuit (the circuit being the whole system.)

If two people engage in a transaction, that is a system and the transaction is an emergent property of that system ... One person is not a system ... What is the "microscale event" in a single person which corresponds to market pricing?

OK, now we're getting serious.

If we're going to analyze transactions as systems, the question is what, exactly, their components are. Obviously, these are the things to be exchanged, and the intentions of the exchangers. It is also obvious that exchangable things can exist, and that agents can have intentions, outside of transactions. So the "atoms" of markets are, goods and services, and the intentions of agents. But can you maintain that the prices of goods and services belong to a different category from an agent's intentions? Such was not my understanding of the economics textbooks I have read.

61 This would be satisfactory, if you had defined "information" as a result of material causes. I do. Because it is. However, as far as I am aware "information" belongs to the same family as "significance", "meaning", and "purpose". Not at all. Information has a specific definition in physics (closely related to entropy), and of course in computer science and information science. Information in computer science and cognitive science is closely tied to the idea of representation and instantiation. Concepts (judgement, for example) cannot exist by themselves; they must be instantiated in the properties and processes of a physical system. Which is to say, information is exactly what Naturalism excludes from the set of admissible causes of events: a non-material phenomenon. Not at all. Information is necessarily a material phenomenon. By making information processing a universal law, you have in effect declared that elementary particles think, and endorsed the ideas of Chalmers and Penrose. No. There is a world of differences between informational transactions and thinking. Unless you consider that, for example, diodes think. Except that it's not a "concept" of judgement I'm appealing to; it's the thing itself, the experience of reaching a judgment, which every human being shares to some extent, of which the scientific method is a refinement. Judgement is information processing. Exactly the same sort of information processing as you can perform with transistors or relays or clever arrangements of cogs and cams. Saying that judgement as we experience it "doesn't apply under Naturalism" is just like saying the orbit of Mercury isn't what astronomers observe it to be, because Newton's theory of gravity would put it somewhere else. I didn't say that. I simply pointed out that there is no special significance to judgement; it is merely a result of material processes. These material process acts entirely according to the laws of physics, and we choose to label one of the results as "judgement". And that's all there is. It's more akin to pointing out that just because there is a planet named Mercury doesn't mean that it is the messenger of the gods.

62 Ah ... oscillation of what? You mention logic gates -- there, what oscillates is the voltage passing through the wires that connect the gates, correct? And voltage in a wire is certainly a characteristic of a component of the logic circuit (the circuit being the whole system.) Yes, an oscillation of voltage. Where did the oscillation come from? You take the components apart, and there is no oscillation to be seen. Put them together, and there it is. So the "atoms" of markets are, goods and services, and the intentions of agents. If you like. Where is the market price? But can you maintain that the prices of goods and services belong to a different category from an agent's intentions? Certainly.

63 ok pixy, you have proven that biochemistry is neccessary, but you have not proven that it is sufficient. can you do that proof? Nope. That proof - actually a theory - is referred to as an Operational Theory of Consciousness. It would explain in detail how the biochemistry of the brain produces consciousness, and we don't have one. What we do have is an immense body of correlations which point - without exception - in one direction. We know that consciousness arises from brain biochemistry. We don't know how, at least not in sufficient detail.

64 Let me try a different tack: I can get a computer to make accurate statements about its environment. I can even get it to take measurements, form hypotheses, test them, construct theories, and so on. (They might be trivial theories; I wouldn't know where to begin on writing a program that could develop General Relativity all by itself. But theories nonetheless.) And I can explain to you, right down to the level of Quantum Mechanics, how the computer is going about this. Is this not judgement? And if not, why not?

65 Oh, and what's more, I can do the same thing with a system that is entirely mechanical - as in Babbage's Difference Engine. It would be an absolute bugger to build and maintain, though.

66 To sum up: Judgement is a mechanical process. So is information (albeit a very much simpler one), thought, love, hope, the free market, the history of science, and this blog. And you and me, of course.

67 Somehow I'm not surprised to learn that Michael is not familiar with Claude Shannon's seminal work. How can anyone who's got even a passing understanding of Information Theory make the claim that "information" belongs to the same family as "significance", "meaning", and "purpose". Exactly the opposite: Shannon proved that information is a purely physical phenomenon.

68 To sum up: Judgement is a mechanical process. So is information (albeit a very much simpler one), thought, love, hope, the free market, the history of science, and this blog. And you and me, of course. ha! Neal Stephenson disagrees. "...but laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with differnt rules....." Perhaps we need another dimension to describe consciousness, or perhaps another medium. Perhaps we need new metaphysicists.

69 Perhaps Neal Stephenson should stick to writing fiction.

70 His speculation on the mind in Snow Crash was fun, but it was basically nonsense. And so is that quote. It's Dualism, and it has the same problem Dualism always has: If you postulate some other realm, entirely separate from our own and not subject to the laws of physics, then it logically cannot interact with the physical world, and to all intents and purposes does not exist. Which is why dualists drink so much.

71 But it is fiction!

the quote is from Diamond Age.

Stephenson interview-- http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml

a part i liked-- "One could argue that people like Leibniz and the others were able to come up with some good ideas because they weren’t afraid to think metaphysically. In those days, metaphysics was still a respected discipline and considered as worthwhile as mathematics. It got the stuffing kicked out of it through much of the 20th century and became a byword for mystical, obscurantist thinking, but in recent decades it has been rehabilitated somewhat. At bottom, anyone who asks questions like “Why does the universe seem to obey laws?” or “Why does mathematics work so well in modeling the physical universe?” is engaging in metaphysics. People like Newton and Leibniz were as well-equipped for this kind of thinking as anyone today, and so it is interesting to read and think about their metaphysics."

Don't you guys think that Science fiction predicts and informs science?

And, are we engaging in metaphysics in speculating about consciousness?

72

Somehow I'm not surprised to learn that Michael is not familiar with Claude Shannon's seminal work.

Allow me to quote from that seminal work: The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. Shannon did not prove "that information is a purely physical phenomenon." Instead he restricted his subject to those aspects of information which are purely physical, leaving out the "semantic aspects", which are not. The researchers in bioinformatics restrict themselves in a very similar way, studying sequences of DNA bases and amino acids as abstract data, without considering how the genes and proteins participate in chemical reactions. Bioinformatics is useful and important, but nobody would expect a complete description of biological functions to arise from it; part of the data needed for such a description has been intentionally left out. "Information theory", Shannon's theory, is in the same boat: useful and important as it is, it is, by Shannon's express intention, not a theory of knowledge.

73 Instead he restricted his subject to those aspects of information which are purely physical, leaving out the "semantic aspects", which are not. The point being, semantics is syntax. The only way for semantics to exist or to act is through syntax.These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.When he said irrelevant, he meant it. "Information theory", Shannon's theory, is in the same boat: useful and important as it is, it is, by Shannon's express intention, not a theory of knowledge. Doesn't matter. We're not talking about knowledge, we're talking about information. Knowledge is like semantics: It only exists in information, and it is irrelevant to the engineering problem (i.e. explaining how things work).

74

I can get a computer to make accurate statements about its environment. I can even get it to take measurements, form hypotheses, test them, construct theories, and so on. ... Is this not judgement? And if not, why not?

At the current state of the art, you cannot, in point of fact, do all of these things. Forming and testing hypotheses, and constructing theories, are faculties beyond our present ability to teach to a computer. Now, it is possible to teach a computer to assess a list of effects (e.g. medical symptoms) and produce a probable cause of those effects. But the algorithms used for this (usually a Bayesian logic engine) do not give rise to new judgements of the scientific type: no expert system ever built will assert that "XYZ is impossible", unless its builders told it so. We can, at present, teach a computer to spot a statistical correlation -- but correlation is not causation, as every scientist knows.

You will no doubt say that I'm doing "judgement of the gaps" now. Not so. We always knew, long before the first expert systems, that diagnosis could be, to a large degree, mechanized; that known problems, with their list of symptoms, could be catalogued. And we also knew that anyone who depended solely on the catalog would be stumped by an unknown problem -- to solve those you need scientific judgement. The behavior of expert systems exactly matches that of a pure catalog-reader: solving known problems easily, and baffled by the unknown.

75 Forming and testing hypotheses, and constructing theories, are faculties beyond our present ability to teach to a computer. Nope. It's done all the time. Focus Forecasting is a simple example, but there are far more complex ones in actual use, let alone research. (And I have, in point of fact, written a Focus Forecasting system.) We can, at present, teach a computer to spot a statistical correlation -- but correlation is not causation, as every scientist knows. Which is irrelevant, because all you ever get is correlations. It's the theory that specifies causation, and theories are only ever provisional. Can a computer form a hypothesis based on a correlation? Of course it can. Having found the correlation, all it has to do is assume that it is causation. Can it test that? Of course it can. The behavior of expert systems exactly matches that of a pure catalog-reader: solving known problems easily, and baffled by the unknown. Where the problem actually lies is in undefined causes. The computer is working from a model of the universe, not from the universe itself. If the model is incomplete, and you feed in a problem from the real world, then the cause may not be reflected in the model. That's hardly a surprise; you've just broken the assumption of Naturalism as it applies to the program.

76

That proof - actually a theory - is referred to as an Operational Theory of Consciousness. It would explain in detail how the biochemistry of the brain produces consciousness, and we don't have one. What we do have is an immense body of correlations which point - without exception - in one direction. We know that consciousness arises from brain biochemistry. We don't know how, at least not in sufficient detail.

Ah, Pixy. That "immense body of correlations" shows that biochemistry is among the causes of human consciousness. Precisely because we lack an operational theory of consciousness, we cannot state with any confidence that biochemistry is the sole cause. That's exactly the fallacy the apothegm "correlation is not causation" warns against.

By the way, I don't drink :)

77 That "immense body of correlations" shows that biochemistry is among the causes of human consciousness. Correct. Lacking a theory providing a plausible and detailed causal link between biochemistry and consciousness, we do need to keep in mind that all we have is 7,000 years worth of data all pointing directly to the fact that in ever case ever examined, consciousness behaves in all ways as though it were generated by brain biochemistry. Oh, and also that no other hypothesis can explain why beer makes you drunk. Precisely because we lack an operational theory of consciousness, we cannot state with any confidence that biochemistry is the sole cause. We can, however, state that no other cause ever put forward has made the slightest shred of sense when confronted with that immense body of correlations. In fact, I'll go further than that and say that we can indeed state with considerable confidence that biochemistry is the sole cause. That's the hypothesis, which is drawn from the correlations. It's a very strongly supported hypothesis, but it is not a full theory. But it doesn't need to be a full theory for us to make that statement. We could, of course, be wrong; but no-one has ever presented any reason to think so.

78

The point being, semantics is syntax. The only way for semantics to exist or to act is through syntax. [...] We're not talking about knowledge, we're talking about information. Knowledge is like semantics: It only exists in information, and it is irrelevant to the engineering problem (i.e. explaining how things work).

Two minor errors: You may prefer to talk about information, but I have been asking you about knowledge from the start. The domain of engineering is not explaining how things work, but exploiting how they work. Network engineers need not know or care what the data passing through the networks they make means. (That's what Shannon was saying.) But if you want to understand the message's sender -- if you're acting, that is, as a scientist -- the meaning of the message is vital to your enquiry.

And now for the major error: "Semantics is just syntax, because it only acts through syntax." I don't know if you have kept up with researches into animal behavior; but it appears that several nonhuman species (all social mammals -- wolves, apes, dolphins) are capable of reaching judgements about their environment, without being able to express them. For these animals, that is, semantics exists without syntax -- a thing you have declared to be impossible.

You should also consider the entities of mathematics. Since these act on matter only through information (e.g. mathematical papers and computations) you would have to assert that they just are the information through which they act: that mathematics is mathematical syntax. However, from this it would follow that the truth of a mathematical theorem is just its provability -- the very proposition that Goedel disproved in 1931.

That's two reasons (from quite different domains, notice) why equating meaning to information is not plausible.

Lacking a theory providing a plausible and detailed causal link between biochemistry and consciousness, we do need to keep in mind that all we have is 7,000 years worth of data all pointing directly to the fact that in ever case ever examined, consciousness behaves in all ways as though it were generated by brain biochemistry.

You keep on repeating this. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Allow me, please, another quote:Again, did I know nothing about the movement of bodies, except what the theory of gravitation supplies, were I simply absorbed in that theory so as to make it measure all motion on earth and in the sky, I should indeed come to many right conclusions, I should hit off many important facts, ascertain many existing relations, and correct many popular errors: I should scout and ridicule with great success the old notion, that light bodies flew up and heavy bodies fell down; but I should go on with equal confidence to deny the phenomenon of capillary attraction. Here I should be wrong, but only because I carried out my science irrespectively of other sciences.

79 Two minor errors: You may prefer to talk about information, but I have been asking you about knowledge from the start. Knowledge is a subclass of information. The advantage of talking about information is that information is well-defined, and knowledge isn't. The domain of engineering is not explaining how things work, but exploiting how they work. Alright then: Knowledge is like semantics: It only exists in information, and it is irrelevant to the scientific problem (i.e. explaining how things work). I don't know if you have kept up with researches into animal behavior; but it appears that several nonhuman species (all social mammals -- wolves, apes, dolphins) are capable of reaching judgements about their environment Well, sure. Anyone who has kept anything more intelligent than a mouse as a pet knows this. without being able to express them. And anyone who has kept anything more intelligent than a mouse as a pet knows that this is false. For these animals, that is, semantics exists without syntax -- a thing you have declared to be impossible. Nope. For animals, semantics exists without spoken language, which is a completely different matter. The syntax is still there. Spoken language is just one specific form of syntax. However, from this it would follow that the truth of a mathematical theorem is just its provability No, that does not follow. A mathematical theorem does not stand alone, but is embedded in the syntax of mathematics. If you examine a theorem without the foundation of mathematics or logic, it doesn't mean much of anything. That's two reasons (from quite different domains, notice) why equating meaning to information is not plausible. Neither of which stands up to any sort of examination. You keep on repeating this. I do not think it means what you think it means. Means what it says: That given the collected data (which is truly vast in scope), the only plausible explanation is that consciousness is generated by the biochemical functioning of the material brain, and that quantum ghosts, souls, magic brain fairies and such like simply do not exist. Here I should be wrong, but only because I carried out my science irrespectively of other sciences. And there you go. Physics tells us that consciousness is a biochemical process. So do chemistry and biochemistry. So do medicine and psychology. Geology and astronomy doen't really say much on the subject, except to report in that Naturalism is working out just fine thanks. What science do you think I have neglected?

80

"... several nonhuman species (all social mammals -- wolves, apes, dolphins) are capable of reaching judgements about their environment without being able to express them. For these animals, that is, semantics exists without syntax -- a thing you have declared to be impossible." Nope. For animals, semantics exists without spoken language, which is a completely different matter. The syntax is still there. Spoken language is just one specific form of syntax.

I assume you mean that the outward behavior of the social animals forms a "syntax". The trouble is, we could not deduce from only the outward behavior of the animals that they reach judgements; we infer that some animals reach judgements by analogy from our own experience as judgement-makers. We take our own minds as a model for the animals' and predict their actions accordingly. We do not find the model in their actions -- the "semantics" is not in the "syntax".

We make the same inference, incidentally, about other human beings: I know that other people reach judgements because, were I in their situation, my behavior as guided by judgements would resemble theirs as I observe it. If I did not have experience of forming judgements, the observable actions of other humans would be unintelligible.

"from [that mathematics is mathematical syntax] it would follow that the truth of a mathematical theorem is just its provability" No, that does not follow. A mathematical theorem does not stand alone, but is embedded in the syntax of mathematics. If you examine a theorem without the foundation of mathematics or logic, it doesn't mean much of anything.

If you suppose you've disagreed with me here, you are mistaken.

What science do you think I have neglected?

The science of consciousness and mentality. Yes, yes, there is no theory of consciousness -- that only means the science is in the empirical stage, disorganized and without a principle. Was there no science of biology before Darwin?

Your problem is, you take an engineer's view of the sciences; you think of the great scientific theories as established truths, to be accepted and turned to use. You are so impressed by the vast extent of phenomena that those theories cover that, though the scientists hold them provisionally and within the limits of observation, you are quite sure that they explain everything. And so, when faced with something the theories don't cover, you assimilate it as far as possible to something they do cover, and dismiss what's left over as "irrelevant to the scientific problem". You exemplify, in fact, the fallacy John Henry Newman spoke of:Men, whose life lies in the cultivation of one science, or the exercise of one method of thought, have no more right, though they have often more ambition, to generalize upon the basis of their own pursuit but beyond its range, than the schoolboy or the ploughman to judge of a Prime Minister. But they must have something to say on every subject; habit, fashion, the public require it of them: and, if so, they can only give sentence according to their knowledge. You might think this ought to make such a person modest in his enunciations; not so: too often it happens that, in proportion to the narrowness of his knowledge, is, not his distrust of it, but the deep hold it has upon him, his absolute conviction of his own conclusions, and his positiveness in maintaining them. He has the obstinacy of the bigot, whom he scorns, without the bigot's apology, that he has been taught, as he thinks, his doctrine from heaven. Thus he becomes, what is commonly called, a man of one idea; which properly means a man of one science, and of the view, partly true, but subordinate, partly false, which is all that can proceed out of any thing so partial. Hence it is that we have the principles of utility, of combination, of progress, of philanthropy, or, in material sciences, comparative anatomy, phrenology, electricity, exalted into leading ideas, and keys, if not of all knowledge, at least of many things more than belong to them,— principles, all of them true to a certain point, yet all degenerating into error and quackery, because they are carried to excess, viz. at the point where they require interpretation and restraint from other quarters, and because they are employed to do what is simply too much for them, inasmuch as a little science is not deep philosophy.

81 Wow, is this thread still going? I think there's a relatively simple way to look at consciousness without getting into a lot of abstraction, which is to start at things that are not very conscious (your thermostat), and move gradually up through the spectra of things that demonstrate increasingly greater levels of consciousness (single-celled organisms, tiny multicellular organisms, insects, lizards, your cats, yourself), then ask: what makes some things more conscious than others? Naturalism eventually gave birth to empriricism, which is probably the most powerful tool ever devised by man. It gave us the entire modern world.

82 'Kay, let's take TallDave's advice, and start at the bottom, or near the bottom. Let's start with something we understand, like say, DNA! and break the processes down with quantum biology and quantum chemistry until we get to the lowest level. Then we can simulate consciousness and categorize it as one of Pixy's isms. ;-)

1 Four readers. What amazes me is the absolute inability of the proponents of ID (aka watered-down creationism) to understand what makes science science. My theory is that the black helicopters are sending out rays making people believe that theology is science. (I'd best adjust my tinfoil hat...). I DEMAND this theory be taught in psychology classes from now on! You can't disprove it, so it must be true! (Sigh)

2 Five apparently. :) Also, I changed the title slightly. P.S. Invisible, silent black helicopters!

3 Five, six, who knows how many readers. But I think your comments on ID are exactly correct.

4 Hi Pixy! ;)

5 i guess i'll be seven then. I'm Christian, so my views are obvious. I'm Also an engineer, which means that i only go off of science. Do i think Creationism/ID should be taught? Sure. Is it a science, and should it be taught as one? Nope. I've said (at least since i left high school) that it shouldn't be taught as a science because it cannot be observed. From this, now i know that an extension to it is that it cannot be Proved wrong. That's an important distinction that i'd not heard of before all of this today, but it makes sense. The first step i do when someone tells me something is to assume the opposite and work my way to the truth, but there's no opposite here. Now the pieces are falling into place. Note, this is NOT sarcasm on my part, that's just the way that i think. :-D (ps, i gotta say it, you're going to hell, but at least you'll have all the good musicians :-D )

6 ...and one duck. I'm not opposed to the concept of ID. *shrug* I don't think it's correct, but I'm not opposed to it. I'm even willing to have it be taught in schools, as long as it's pointed out that it's not scientific, can't be proven, and as such is simply another article of faith. I might be wrong, of course... everything could have been Created by (a) God. The universe could be riding on the back of an enormous Space Lemur, too. I don't know that it's not, but that don't make it right. "...enormous Space Lemur." Hmmm...

7 I don't go for Intelligent Design, but I think there might be room for just a little teleology in evolution and cosmology. One of my favourite (possibly untestable) hypotheses is the Final Anthropic Theory, which postulates that the nature of the universe is such that it can only exist if it eventually evolves to a state that possesses infinite consciousness/intelligence. This idea is vaguely based on the apparently inextricable relationship between quantum events and conscious observation.

8 The Anthropic Principle in its various forms is interesting, but not, I think, terribly useful. That the Universe is the way it is because if it was some other way we wouldn't be here to ask the question is simultaneously profound and deeply unhelpful.

9 Here's a nice op-ed to a college paper discussing the weak anthropomorphic principle and how it relates to ID (also sometimes called the strong anthropomorphic principle). If your interested, there's also a link to the original lecture that generated this letter on the website. Weak Anthropomorphic Principle vs ID

10 Thanks. You know, when it comes to commenters, it's not quantity but quality that counts. I'll take half a dozen thoughtful comments over a two-hundred-post flame war any day. (Roger Simon manages to get quantity and quality, possibly because he is such a thoroughly nice guy himself. But he's one of a very few.)

11 Ha! Well, I just started blogging again, at a new site and no longer using a nick. My other blog we sort of a middle of the road dweller, but now I have no commenters, no technorati, no ecosystem, nada. But, it's kind of cool to start from scratch and see where you end up. Plus, I'm finding all kinds of blogs that I didn't know about, and that's a good thing. Cocooning really does trap your worldview if you're not careful.

12 Intelligent Design has a place in schools... if they're the sort of schools that teach Applied Theology, or whatever they're calling it these days. These schools have their charms - my crazed evangelical aunt used to be the principal of one of those schools. But they probably oughtn't be government-financed, and definitely ought not to be financed by my taxes, thankyouverymuch. Of course Bush is an idiot. But... he's our idiot. I'm generally inclined to do him the mercy of ignoring him when he gets his idiot on in public.

13 Of course Bush is an idiot. But... he's our idiot. I'm generally inclined to do him the mercy of ignoring him when he gets his idiot on in public. As I remarked, this is something I'm touchy about. I don't mind at all if people say, Yeah, it's wrong, but it's not my number one priority right now.

14 We could DO a flame war if you'd like, Grand High Pixy. I dunno what we'd flame about, but we could do it.

15 Two points for consideration:

1. Farensic sciences include the examination of whether events were caused by design. e.g. was this fire started intentionally? So to say there is no science in ID may be an oversimplification.

2. A reason that so many are pushing for ID to be taught in schools is the near "religious" insistance on evolution which is far from a complete theory. Much evolution happens as a matter for observation. Some is a good scientific model closely explaining observations. Some of it may one day soon be replaced by new theories. So let's not be "evangelical" about evolution either.

16 1. There are fundamental requirements for scientific theories: they must explain something, they must predict something, they must be falsifiable. ID meets none of these requirements, so it is not a scientific theory. What it is, I don't know, but it's certainly not a scientific theory. 2. Evolutionary Theory is incredibly well supported by evidence. No, it's not a final theory, as evidenced by the fact that it has changed in certain details even over the past decade. But it is a scientific theory, and it's an extremely reliable one. It's the unifying theory of biology. The only reason anyone insists on it is because people are so bitterly opposed to it on non-scientific grounds. If people argued against the Theory of Relativity in similar ways, there'd be similar insistance in teaching it. Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is one hundred percent bullshit. It's a scientific fraud created from the ground up to get religion into schools and challenge what its creators see as a threat to their beliefs. As I said: Intelligent Design is claimed to be a scientific theory. A scientific theory must be falsifiable. ID is not falsifiable. Therefore ID is not a scientific theory. This has been hashed out many times. The proponents of ID know all this, and persist in claiming that ID is a scientific theory. That's fraud. Don't bother to take this any further - or at least, not here. There are many other web sites and news groups where you can get an education on Evolutionary Theory and have all your false impressions corrected, but I'm not interested in doing it.

17 Neal, I have to disagree. The Strong Anthropic Principle is not ID, nor is it related to ID. The SAP hypothesises that the only type of universe which can exist is one which is capable of producing intelligent life. It does not in any way suggest that such universes must be created or designed by any intelligent agent. SAP might not be falsifiable on its own, though it could be that some future Theory of Everything that includes SAP may be falsifiable.