[Synapse elist] short response

[Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic]

Hello list!

Thank you for so many good ideas and references. I am enjoying the discussion very much, and I found many good thoughts, so this subject will keep me busy for a while!
Let me try to contribute to questions I believe I can offer a comment on.

Greg says:
GH: “Then we notice that whenever we come close to the sponge we remember our childhoods. And this is the case for 70% of the people who come near it. Is the sponge influencing our thoughts? If so, is that an indication of agency on the part of the sponge? or is it just a visual trigger of our memories?”

GDC: This question can be answered from “Epistemology Naturalized: The Info-Computationalist Approach” framework.
Not only sponges, but hills, skies and actually nearly everything may awake memories and feelings. Shall we think skies as alive?  Extrapolating, we come to the interesting question of what is life? In a limit case of very simple beings like viruses? Biologists could help, but maybe one can say even without knowing a definition of life that cognition is a result of interaction with the world (which of course includes humans, animals and the rest). We interact with inanimate objects and our interaction with those changes us (we have become “homo faber” because of using tools, stone in the beginning.)

GH: “If this is so then the division between AI and human intelligence or agency or experience is just one of degree rather than kind.”
GDC: I agree. Add also that people may get cognitive enhancements in the future which is even more blurring the difference between natural and artificial life/intelligence.

Erika says:
EL: “But how can one conceive of the new when all one knows is what lies before them........???”
GDC: How new forms arise evolutionary in the interaction between an organism and the world? Combining existing elements (of which only some survive).

W Shawn Gray says:
WSG: (on "free will" as an illusion)
”In that context the 31 May 2008 issue of New Scientist has a great article. "Grand Theory of the Brain" about it all being a massive Bayesian probability machine in constant comparison of ones expectation with realities sensory feedback..”
GDC: This is a view about non-existence of free will that very often comes up. Is sweetness only an illusion when we know that sugar molecule itself is not sweet at all?
A good argument for info-computationalist approach is given by Douglas Hofstadter in Victim of the brain (see http://www.mathrix.org/liquid/ for wealth of extremely interesting information). Somewhere in the movie Hofstadter says that we actually all are made of atoms, a discovery which made him re-think his views on what human is.
Does that make us less real? No homunculi are needed in a complex world where qualitatively new behaviors emerge on different levels of organization.
Knowing that on certain basic level human is just a heap of specifically (extremely complexly) arranged atoms does not mean we are less worth. We are not only atoms, we are complex machines made of simple elements and those elements follow physical laws as we all know. Again I believe that my virtual machine metaphor might be helpful here.
We can construct a virtual machine operating on some basic machine, and that hierarchy of meta-machines can consist of several layers. Each layer is its own world. Virtual unix running on windows is a unix anyway. Our thoughts, memories and feelings are running on some “physical operating system”, but they are quite different from their physical basis.

Reva says:
RS: "I have been interested in the number of responses that felt the issues could be answered by equating cognition, perception, reasoning, speech, memory, choice etc. with information or what Erika called a "computational world view".  I guess what I am saying late at night is, in a computational info model for life and intelligence such as Gordana talked about, where is there room for experience, personality and the intentionality that Daniel mentioned."
GDC: I guess I answered that one in my comment about the sweetness and the sugar molecule. Feynman famously said: “There is plenty of room at the bottom” and our experiences with virtual worlds (artistic imagery, simulations, emulations, ..) seem to clearly show that there is even plenty of room on the top (of cognitive hierarchies)!

Best wishes,
Gordana
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.synapse.net.au/pipermail/elist/attachments/20080614/217bc624/attachment.html