How much do you know about single taped Turing machines? Nothing could be more serial. And they are capable of replicating the behavior of any computer, parallel or serial.


Any Turing machine (serial) could replicate all of the above, to any degree desired. Memory is the only limitation.


It's difficult to answer your statement above when it is in conflict with what I have been saying, but then, in the last sentence, it concludes what I concluded. Your above statement, in the first sentence, is not well grounded. See my above statements about Turing machines. Your conclusions, however ill founded they are, basically say what I said. That is, one doubts the sense of such a machine being conscious. Unfortunately, your statements below confound the issue due to your incorrect assumptions as to what consciousness is and what qualia are.


You are completely wrong here. That is not what qualia refers to. The way the brain responds to sensory input is not qualia. What you have described is a physical process. Qualia refers to the accompanied experience of the way things seem which correlates to different processes occurring within the brain - typically a distributed activation of a subset of the brain's neurons. You might want to get familiar with the concept of Philosophical Zombies and their conceivability. Whether you buy into the conceivability of Philosophical Zombies or not is irrelevant - you still must understand what they are to fully discuss qualia. Note that we're not even talking about the possibility of Philosophical Zombies actually existing, merely the conceivability of them.


Again, not quite right, but closer. You must detach qualia from the term "sensing". Sensing refers to a change in state due to incoming stimulation. That is not qualia. Qualia is the the experience which accompanies sensing either internal or external changes in state.


Nobody is really making any such claim. If it were so simple, we wouldn't have such discussions, and people such as Chalmers, Dennett, Penrose and Hofstadter would be writing basic texts of how things work, rather than how they hypothesize what might be happening.


Wrong. Consciousness is not a word we use to describe the complexity and responsiveness of a system to its environment.

You're the one not getting it. But I'll give you a second chance. If you're so certain what my viewpoint is, then please clarify it for me so that I know what I'm defending. Please do tell me what I advocate and what I don't advocate. Be precise.

Do you like dogs? If you don't like the idea of killing, then consider a campaign to eradicate dogs from the surface of the Earth, as they eat meat.

Do you like the idea of the Earth existing, and life on Earth? Because if you do, consider learning about trophic cascades and the necessity of the predator and prey relationship. For starters, learn about wolves, riparian zones, and clean water.

I don't advocate sick little serial killers in the making torturing animals. Is this what you're referring to? Are you having trouble discerning torture from natural processes? Are you trying to compare sick people to the way things work? Are you challenged with regard to this subject?

Nature's life cycle depends on prey/predator relationships. I think you can figure it out from there.

I'm not quite agreeing with you, from a common sense point of view.

Also, on a different note, consider this: you lose consciousness, for whatever reason, i.e. being put under for surgery, passing out, sleep, etc. When you regain consciousness, what does that mean, exactly? The most likely scenario is you only think you were the person you were before you lost consciousness, precisely because you have those memories - in a sense, you are fooled into believing you exist as something moving through time.

Let's take it further. For most every conscious instant of your life, you possess the memory of being what you were, thus you have this sense of identity, whereas the truth of the matter is, you might as well be the recreated replica of yourself as Captain Kirk is when he beams down to a planet.

To reiterate: Captain Kirk steps into the transporter room and is vaporized - killed. His form is recreated exactly on the planet's surface at the molecular level, and thus the new Captain Kirk has the memories of the former Captain Kirk, and thus believes he is the former Captain Kirk, but he isn't. The former Captain Kirk is dead.

However, this isn't just happening to Captain Kirk. It happens to everyone, every moment of their life.

Killing animals humanely for meat consumption is not the equal of torturing animals for entertainment. Killing animals in an unkind way for meat consumption is not equal to torturing animals for entertainment.

Why have you boldfaced "symbolism via neural circuitry"?

As for your two remarks, oddly they are contradictory.

I understand what you're saying, and it's worthy of discussion, but it's not addressing the Hard Problem (note the capitalization). Why does the structure and function of the brain give rise to qualia? By the way, another term worth coming to grips with is the Explanatory Gap.

Consider the following two scenarios:

1. You step into the transporter room and your body is scanned at the molecular level and you are recreated somewhere else. Only problem is, the machine failed to actually destroy your body at this location. A service technician approaches you and says: "Sir, a minor glitch occurred. If you could come this way we'll manually finish the process..."

2. You step into the transporter room and your body is scanned at the molecular level and you are recreated not once, but three different times in three different locations. Clearly, you, the person who stepped into the transporter room, can't be all three of the newly created individuals. Granted, from their perspective, each of the three are you and fully believes in the success of the transportation process, but logically, at the very most, you are only one of them, and the other two are not. It makes further sense that you are in fact none of them, and are in fact, dead, forever, and not experiencing the world at all.

So you would submit yourself to being killed, and allow a replica of yourself which contains the exact memories and brain structure to be created to replace yourself?

Some of the terms and concepts worth getting to know to enrich the discussion:

- Philosophical zombies
- The Hard Problem
- The Chinese Room
- Panpsychism
- Materialism
- Dualism
- The Explanatory Gap

And I'd like to mention again that I personally think the Star Trek problem is worth discussing as well, as it helps one think about the connection of consciousness to physical matter.

Dennett does not satisfy me either. Basically, he claims that we are essentially tricked into thinking we're conscious.

Here's the deal though - if you found Dennett unsatisfying, then you must read Chalmers.

Yes, but you might want to differentiate more clearly perceptions vs. qualia. Both Dennett and Chalmers would probably agree with what you're saying, which means something is amiss with you what you're saying. Dennett and Chalmers both agree that 1 + 1 = 2, but that's generally not the subject of the discussion. When you start thinking of it in a way where you agree with one and disagree with the other, then you're on the right track.

On a different note, but related, would you (or anybody reading this) step into the Star Trek Transporter Room, assuming it has been demonstrated to work 100 percent of the time?

Dennett largely claims it is knowable. But even so, it's the fact that it seems to be unknowable that makes it interesting.

Dennett's explanation of consciousness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48ol4sHasA8

I lean towards Chalmers.

David Chalmers' view, in a nutshell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo

David Chalmers. Daniel Dennett. John Searle. Douglas Hofstadter. Roger Penrose. Stuart Hammeroff. Materialsim. Dualism. Panpsychism. The Hard Problem. The Chinese Room. The Star Trek Transporter Room.

Have a go at it...

Your analogies are laughable. The very definition of justice pertains to fairness, equity and the upholding of law. Please show where orange juice and jet engines are products in which individuals expect the same from.

Correct. You won't have that responsibility. And you might not have the resources. In fact, you almost certainly won't have the ability or resources to protect even yourself from certain individuals and their followers. You'll just hope that such individuals don't take a liking to your neck of the woods.

That sounds like an admission that NAP is not realistic. It's one thing to pine for a society where it will work, and in theory it could work if the society was small and all were fervent NAP believers, but it simply isn't workable in the real world.

So, we've been asking the same question to you guys over and over. How do you make NAP work? And we finally got an answer: it won't work, accept in small isolated communities.

You clearly align yourself with Dennett. Dennett attempts to explain the existence of qualia by explaining the resultant effects of physical processes happening inside the brain. It's not a satisfying explanation. I prefer Chalmers.

The first step: be very clear on what qualia is. It isn't the perception of red. It isn't even the assigning of a label of red in your mind, i.e. "I see the color red", which is in fact the recognition of seeing red and consolidating of all that neural activity into an alternate, perhaps simpler set of neural activity: symbolism via neural circuitry. Qualia are a set of experiences which equate to what it's like to see red.

Consider: the brain is a parallel machine. It is composed of cells which fire together through internal and external feedback. However, the resultant effects of those processes can be simulated on a computer either via parallel methods with the appropriate hardware, or serial hardware.

In other words, given a machine that has one processor and enough memory, the activities of neural circuitry within a brain can be simulated - each and every neuron and its attendant dendrites and axons and action potentials. The program code can be tuned through equations which simulate physical processes to produce the exact same neural activity, and if the machine is fast enough, at the exact same speed.

The problem is, from a complexity view, the silicon machine can have the exact same architecture as a computer from ten years ago or earlier. Any Turing complete machine, serial or otherwise, given enough memory, can reproduce both the output of a brain, and the internal states of a brain. If you were to argue that that machine, while running the above described simulation, was experiencing qualia, then you must consider that that machine, while running any program, including its native operating system, is experiencing qualia. But it's perfectly reasonable and probably correct that a machine running serial machine code is not experiencing qualia.

Then we have panpsychism. Let's assume we live on a very large planet with many nations like China. Let's assume the population is equivalent to the number of neurons inside the brain. Either because that's the way it happens, or because the people are instructed to behave a certain way, let's assume that through communication among people, messaging occurs between the people such that messages are passed between people in patterns that exactly replicate what happens in your brain when you see red.

Ignoring the consciousness of each individual person in the above scenario (in fact, we can assume they are simple mechanical machines), can we say that the population as a whole is experiencing qualia?

This then naturally raises the question: is our world economy conscious? It certainly mimics the processes of the brain through the actions of its constituent elements and outputs behavior.

Yes, in a sense, we do need more data, but what will it get us? Likely nothing. Understanding the neuron down to the quantum level only allows us to create simulations at a more granular level.

What is needed is a theory on consciousness that is as revolutionary as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which can make predictions, and allow for testing.

However, testing the behavior of the system which is allegedly conscious by observing what it does and says is not the correct way, unless you accept panpsychism - i.e. consciousness in everything, which may or may not be true. A new theory most likely must posit that consciousness is a fundamental property of physical matter (panpsychism in a sense), or an external as of yet unknown component of the Universe which exists, but we just don't know it yet.