Joel Cannon wrote:
> I suspect that I am well behind the curve with regard to what has been
> meaningfully said and asked about consciousness, but it strikes me
> that the naturalists (and some Christians who fear the scientific
> description) focus on the physical process, believing that an
> exhaustive physical description of the biochemical processes going on
> in our heads now would "explain" consciousness.
>
> I would like to suggest that this microscopic reductionism can conceal
> knowledge, and question whether this approach is likely to lead to
> real understanding of consciousness. I think the following quote from
> a physics paper by Yoshi Oono is germane: (Please forgive typos--I am
> copying it as I type)
>
[snip]
I don't think using a computer analogy is a good way around
this mainly because it lands us straight on top of the Turing
machine, and linear combiniations of logic and memory
circuits.
Burgy's question: "is consciousness real" actually digs
more into whether our "consciousness" is algorithmic or not.
If the conscious part of the mind is simply complex, but
can be linked together like a so called neural network,
then simply adding more "components" is sufficient to make
the mind "conscious". Arguably, "consciousness" would be
mere illusion under such circumstances because it is entirely
algorithmic: you achieve the needed complexity by simply
increasing the number of structures.
What counters that position would be arguments based
on Godel's theorem. The argument here centers around
whether it is possible to build a "mathematical theorem
proving machine" using only a finite number of axioms.
Hence, from an assembly language, you can write a driver
program to run your coffee machine. Then you can use
C language to run it (where C language is a set of
statements that are built on the assembly language).
Actually I should probably use binary<assembly<C in
that order but I think my point is clear up to here.
Since C is also presumably a consistent set of primitives,
you can propose use the C language to build a formal logic
analyzer. However, can you show that all the propositions
made by the logic analyzer are decidable from the primitives
of the C language? From Godel's theorem, it seems that is
very unlikely. In essence, "the consistency of arithmetic
cannot be established by an argument that can be represented
in the formal arithmetical calculus." (Nagel and Newman,
"Godel's Proof", New York University Press, 1986.)
So if you cannot show from mere logic propositions that your
theorem proving machine works (a machine that works on formal
logic algorithms), you surely are in knotty situation when
you propose to apply your machine to a natural language.
Hence, your Microsoft Word grammar check can analyze you
writing because it has many "axioms" (a term I use loosely
here to describe the rules inherent in English grammar),
and it can even do it reasonably well if the database of
"axioms" is sufficiently large enough to express your "typical"
propositions. However, it cannot identify if what you say
has any meaning, nor can it even identify if *every*
grammatical structure you construct is consistent.
So the question would be, is the brain simply a huge
list of "axioms" which can be set up modularly to make
a more intelligent "mind", or is the human mind something
much different? In, Glenn Morton's book "Adam Apes and
Anthropology", he points out that there is no connection
between brain size and intelligence. Indeed, there are
examples of people with brains the same size as an ape
who show normal or above average intelligence. So
increasing the number of "substructures" is arguably not
the key. Nevertheless, I concede that we have not
achieved the same memory capacity as the human brain,
so we may yet be proven "algorithmic". On the other hand,
the fact that the boastful claims of reductionists have
not been realized is an indication that there also may be
some truth to Roger Penrose's core argument.
So if our minds are not merely complex algorithms, then
we will eventually have to look elsewhere to understand
what consciousness is. I favor the "elsewhere" position.
Often in its zeal to caste off the complexity,
reductionism has a tendency to miss the richness of
universe.
By Grace we proceed,
Wayne
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Nov 17 2001 - 00:15:49 EST