Raúl
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Philosophical Zombies (p-zombie) - 2007/06/01 13:51
As per the discussion starter by user Plato Demosthenes elsewhere about zombies, I've created this new thread where the topic can be approached in detail.
As a brief introduction on the topic, let's use this excerpt from [1]:
Philosopher's zombies are hypothetical beings behaviorally, functionally, and perhaps even physically indistinguishable from normal humans, but who lack our consciousness. Many people seem to be convinced that such zombies are a real conceptual possibility, and that this bare possibility entails that understanding human consciousness must remain forever beyond the reach of science. However, the conceptual entailments of zombiehood have not been sufficiently examined. [...]
In this paper, Nigel argues that zombies are not conceptually possible. However, there are many arguments and ideas around this concept.
David Chalmers offers a useful classification of the types of zombies in [2]. As per the title of this thread, we will focus here on philosophical zombies (These are found in philosophical articles on consciousness. Their defining features is that they lack conscious experience, but are behaviorally (and often physically) identical to normal humans).
[1] Thomas Nigel. Zombie Killer. Paper read at the Toward a Science of Consciousness (Tucson II) Conference, Tucson, AZ, April 1996. (http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/nthomas/zom-abs.htm)
[2] http://consc.net/zombies.html
Post edited by: Raúl, at: 2007/06/01 13:51
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Re:Philosophical Zombies (p-zombie) - 2007/06/01 14:02
So this is the original post by Plato Demosthenes:
Well...not to clog up this topic again, but I have a few ideas regarding zombies which I would like to bounce off of you, and didn't see anywhere else to put this. So, here it goes: Assume that Douglas Hofstadters' idea about minds having approximate copies of other minds (approximate starnge loops within your central one) inside of them is true. (Are you familiar with his work)? Then, for everyone you meet or even think about (for that matter, sense in anyway) that you think are conscious has a small, usually minute and blurry, portion of their consciousness within your mind. Zombies, by definition, act indistinguishable from a conscious being, so you think that they are conscious. This leads you to develop a strange loop of them in your mind. Since that strange loop, however small it may be, is all the consciousness they would have, you would have given them a mind, literally. Thus, by definition, they are no longer zombies. This means that one can never interact, in any way, with a zombie.
Does that line of reasoning make any sense to you? Or is there a gaping logical flaw in it which I have not seen yet? I only recently thought of it, so probably I have not developed as fully as it can go, but it seems on first sight rather logical to me. Thanks!
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Re:Philosophical Zombies (p-zombie) - 2007/06/01 14:51
Well, some authors, as pointed out in the opening of this thread, discard the feasibility of the concept of a philosophical zombie. So the reasoning based on the strange loop idea could be one proof of that. Anyhow, I am not familiar with the work you mentioned. I think you refer to this book, right?
I am a strange loop. Douglas R. Hofstadter. Basic Books, 2007
I'll try to at least have a look to it soon.. Unfortunately, I don't understand the concept of 'strange loop' yet. The interesting point to me in relation with your argumentation is that we always tend to 'grant' phenomenal capabilities to others (animals and even objects included). I think this is part of our evolved sense of inter-subjectivity. I wonder whether or not there is a difference between thinking of a zombie as a conscious being (as I understood from your post) and thining of your personal computer as conscious hardware (because you see some intentionality in its behaviour - I personally tend to think that the blue screen comes up intentionally in the worst time possible).
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Plato Demosthenes
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Re:Philosophical Zombies (p-zombie) - 2007/06/02 17:58
Yes, the book that I based a lot of my ideas on was I Am a Strange Loop. Essentially, a strange loop is a ... self-referential, often paradox-causing system with cycling casuality (between downward and upward). Think of Eschers' hands: self referential (indirectly drawing themselves, paradox -causing (what actually drew it), and cycling casualty (Hand 1 draws Hand 2, downward casualty, and Hand 2 proceedsn to draw Hand 1, upward casualty). This occurs in consciousness because we have a sense of I or self, self referential, are neurons are causing the symbols that we think, yet an equally good interpretation of events is that the symbols cause the neurons to fire, (cycling casualty), and we are paradox causing because of the ambiguity of the casualty - both interpretations are equally correct.
Yes, humans do have an excessive impulse to grant sentience to things. Personification which is inherent in our language, I think, plays a large role in it (possibly from the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?).
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Re:Philosophical Zombies (p-zombie) - 2007/06/04 04:24
An odd implication of this is that, if "Cogito ergo sum" is true, and everything that we think has consciousness does, then everything we think has consciousness exists! Then again, assuming that thinking implies existence is rather controversial, and possibly wrong. Also, it may be that the degree of sentience - the "size" of the strange loop, in a sense - gives varying degrees of existence. Still, though, it would seem to imply that Luke Skywalker, whose strange loop resides in the brains of millions to highly accurate degrees of accuracy, exists more than an isolated hermit on a Pacific island - one who clearly is real more than a fictional character. Which assumption, if any, would thus be shown to be false?
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Re:Philosophical Zombies (p-zombie) - 2007/06/05 02:22
This is just a continuation of some ruminations on existence that I had and thought would be appropriate here.
So, if I exist, then others exist. Yet, what is the validity of Cogito Ergo Sum? It implies that if X thinks, then X is. Why, though, should this property apply only to sentience? Why not let it hold for any property, say, red-ness? However, if that were the case, then me thinking about a red dragon would cause dragons to exist - for the thought-dragon would clearly have the property of red-ness, and it is red, therefore it is. This result is clearly non-sensical if reality and existennce are to be regarded as the same thing. So, clearly there is something unique to having a mind. Would the same be true about acting as though one had a mind?
Clearly, simply saying that sentience implies existence leaves many questions unanswered. Clarification is needed. To start with, the whole point of this is to make sure that I, and the things which I percieve, exist. Why wouldn't they exist? Well, either I am being decieved, as by the Demon of Descartes, or I am simply ignorant of the truth, as by being a dream, computer program, so forth - or, then again, there may be another possibility which eludes me. Let us analyze the possibilities of both. The demon either has a mind, or doesn't - though it certainly acts as though it has a mind. Let's assume, for now, that it does have one. Then, either it has a conception of me, or it doesn't. Let us now assume that it does have a conception of me. Then, since it has a mind, and has a conception of me, I exist, albeit in the same way as the zombies mentioned earlier in this discussion. Thus, that particular possibility means that I exist. Now let us assume that it does not have a conception of me. Then, it certainly acts as though I do - it has a sort of negative-space version of me. Logically, any information which directly gives a function, when combined with something to make that difference, is equivalent to the function. So, the same srgument previously applied holds true.
Does this seem logicaal so far? I will have to come back to it later.
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Re:Philosophical Zombies (p-zombie) - 2007/06/05 13:23
I’ve included above the Picture of Escher hands, just to illustrate what you said earlier about the strange loops. By the way, I was looking for information directly from Hofstadter on that matter, and I found this video which could be interesting for you:
http://www.conscious-robots.com/en/researchers-and-associations/interviews/douglas-r.-hofstadter-at-
sta-2.html
It is from a summit at Stanford. I don’t know the exact date of the event, but they mention at the beginning that Hofstadter was writing the book ‘I Am a Strange Loop’ at that time. I didn’t have the chance to watch it all yet, so I don’t know whether or not the matter is covered in this speech. Anyhow, I see the cycling causality in a strange loop more than a self-feedback system than a paradox. I mean, there is actually no ambiguity, you just need a beginning. Once you have one hand that is able to draw another drawing-capable hand, that’s it. You have a strange loop. Does it make sense? A system able to build some sort of self-reference machinery would potentially develop a strange loop. I tend to think of that loop as the link between the bottom-up and top-down cognition flows. Bottom-up flow involves the generation of symbolic representations from sub-symbolic systems (neurons). Top-down processing in turn, takes symbolic representations and ground them to the realm of a connectionist (sub-symbolic) system. I think that a successful combination of these two parallel flows is one of the challenges of AI. Models of consciousness, as the ones we are discussing here, might help to achieve a solution for this.
The issue of language and personification is also quite interesting. Also, the debate about language being a key factor for producing consciousness. I’ll open a new forum thread on language and consciousness so we can cover topics like Sapir-Whorf hypothesis there:
http://www.conscious-robots.com/en/forums-./consciousness-theories/consciousness-and-language/
view.html
About what you said before on this implication:
An odd implication of this is that, if "Cogito ergo sum" is true, and everything that we think has consciousness does, then everything we think has consciousness exists! Then again, assuming that thinking implies existence is rather controversial, and possibly wrong.
I believe that thinking that something has consciousness doesn’t imply at all that it actually has consciousness. I would say in another way, we have evolved in a social environment in which having internal models of others is very helpful for survival and everyday life. Therefore, we tend to grant sentience to other subjects (and even other things). It is actually an assumption or hypothesis about the others that we take for granted, because we don’t have any proof of their consciousness. But I wouldn’t say that because we think they are conscious they actually are. It is just our biased perception trying to recognize what it has been designed to recognize. An analogous example occurs when we recognize a face in wood grain or in a cloud shape. There is actually no face there, but we are designed to recognize faces, so we sometimes fail by excess.
So I would say that Luke Skywalker and red dragons exist in our minds, but nowhere else. On the matter of zombies, I will come up with more on that later..
Post edited by: Raúl, at: 2007/06/05 13:25
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Plato Demosthenes
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Re:Philosophical Zombies (p-zombie) - 2007/06/15 00:48
Sorry for the delayed response. By the way, the video link was interesting. Would you happen to know how the whole event turned out in the end?
Earlier, I should have been more clear about the "paradox". You are right in that it is not a true paradox. It is really...more subtle than that. It is not just self-reference, in that you cannot choose which hand starts it - since it would have already been drawn by Hand 2, which was already drawn by Hand 1...etc. It is not directly changing itself that way. In the mind, this corresponds to how the neurons, at their own level, operate according to their rules, generating the symbols - yet it is just, or possibly even more, accurate to say that the symbols are generating the neuronal responses. Meanwhile, they both are operating in their own domains as well. It is this sort of ambiguity, this ability to step outside itself - while still being, in a sense, within itself. An important, albeit rather technical, example that Hofstadter develops a lot throughout his books is that of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, where the symbols wrap back around on themselves. All of this probably sounds like a jumble of zen-based New-Age ramblings, which it may be, but these ideas are far better expressed in the book, which I highly reccomend to you.
I certainly agree with your Bottom-Up, Top-Down approach, and that both are crucial to the development of an actual AI. And perhaps our little discussions here might eventually prove to be along the right lines - perhaps not. I personally think that both approaches are rather far off from being accurately modeled, let alone combined - but who knows.
I believe that thinking that something has consciousness doesn’t imply at all that it actually has consciousness.
Well, I also am uncertain as to the validity of such a statement. I feel as though either Hostadter's ideas (which I will go over in a moment) are flawed, or my logic is..and that is really why I thought to raise this question in the first place. Maybe you might find some flaws in the logic that I couldn't. Maybe his ideas really are wrong. However, what I am doing is developing Hofstadter's ideas to their full extent - and seeing where it takes you. He proposes in the book that one's mind is not fully residing in the brain. Instead, though it is centralized in the brain, it extends outward into the brains of those around you as well. For example, if you know someone their entire life, have had hundreds or thousands of conversations with them about all sorts of topics, interact in countless ways day in and day out - then you will have a very accurate representation in your own mind of their own strange loop, and they of yours'. One way of looking at it is that, just as a "simulation" on a computer of a mind would be a mind, the representation of a mind in a mind would be a mind. Another way of thinking about it is that, just as the "input and output" of a person make up, in essence, that person, a simulation of them that gave their inputs and outputs would also be them. You may, for instance, be able to know what they would choose in many given situations, or to accurately guess at what they would responfd to a particular comment. It may be inaccurate at times - a mere approximation of their strange loop - but it still is a strange loop. Why? Because you have, from your knowledge of their inputs and outputs, assumed that they actually were conscious.
This means that everyone you meet or interact with, in anyway, that yopu believe to be conscious will have their own little strange loop inside of your mind. Your family would have very accurate strange loops inside of your mind, and the man on the bench that you see from the corner of your eye as you are driving will have very liitle - but they all would, if Hofstadter is right, have one. Now wait - as you read that previous description of the man, you developed some idea of his consciousness. You have constructed a mental image of his looks, or of those around him - perhaps he is a business man, holding a briefcase and drinking his coffee, or maybe of a father surrounded by two young kids, waiting for a bus - either way, you now know in your mind some stereotype or approximation of him. If I were to ask you what he was thinking about, you may answer that he was thinking about the deadline tomorrow, or the stocks, or his children, or something along thoose lines. You might be completely wrong about what the man that I had in mind when I wrote this was thinking, but you also - I would assume - thought him to have a mind, just like I do (I'm not sure about you - unless, that is, this whole idea is right   ). This whole post has been one long mind-generator - with each and every one of the descriptions or statements I have made, you have thought countless conscious beings into existence, and increased my own quantity of sentience. It turns out, though, that the man has, all along, been decieving us - it turns out that he is a zombie! Yet, now, he has a mind, and what you had thought to be a crude approximation of someones' mind has turned into an actual one. All of this stems from the conclusion made in I Am A Strange Loop. If the initial assumptions about the multitude of minds within all sentient creatures (let's call this the Hofstadter assumption) is held to be true, would the rest of my conclusions that I have made logically follow? If so, either it could be taken as a huge pitfall and case against the assumption, or as an odd implication to be accepted if one holds it true.
This is where the issue of personification comes in. Our language has personification built into its very structure, and (due to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) this causes us to think other beings into consciousness constantly. Our perception, as you mentioned, amplifies this effect even more. So, if one were to hold both the Hofstadter assumption and Cogito Ergo Sum true, then beings are constantly coming into existence. Thus, the red dragons and Luke Skywalker would, in that sense, exist. This, though, raises several questions: Is existence the same as being real? Is the Hofsadter assumption true? And, is Cogito Ergo Sum true? For all of these, why?
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Re:Philosophical Zombies (p-zombie) - 2007/06/15 00:50
Oh...sorry for the double posting (again  ). I'll have to delete it when it becomes an official post.
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Re:Philosophical Zombies (p-zombie) - 2007/06/15 10:55
No worries! That's part of my work 
Thanks for your new post! I need to leave now, but I'll reply soon..
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