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From: departed@netcom.com (just passing through)
Subject: Re: Thought Question
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Date: Wed, 22 Feb 1995 22:20:52 GMT
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In article <3iehgk$jmu@news.u.washington.edu>,
Gary Forbis  <forbis@cac.washington.edu> wrote:
>In article <departedD4BCF2.6IF@netcom.com>, departed@netcom.com (just passing through) writes:
[...deletia...]
>
>|> I'd say an intuitive definition would be, "anything that can demonstrate
>|> subjectivity is conscious."
>
>I'm not sure how subjectivity can be demonstrated.  I pretty sure responsivity
>to internal states mapped (by an external agent) to subjective states can be
>demonstrated.  I'm not yet willing to accept hunger is any internal state
>which can be mapped to the subjective experience of hunger.

Hmm, so you're trying to say that subjectivity per se does not exist?

I would say that anything that maintains a flow of information decoupled
to some extent from the outside world is 'subjective' to that extent.
(I would also expect the space wherein the information is flowing to
have certain properties, such as being fairly complete, allowing
almost any kind of transformation.)
Hence, from the outside, if entity X were hungry and it said, "Let's
go to Burger King, it's cheap"  I would consider that a better indication
of subjectivity than its forcing its face into a pile of food.
From the inside (if we had a glass window) we might see 'hungry'
continuously radiating associations -- "<stomach hurting> need food
<blur> can't think <feeling weak> <stomach hurting> burgers are good!
steak is better!  steak is expensive ... (no money) (need job) <feel
bad about being lazy> <forget it> get burger ... [emit statement aimed
at getting burger]"
Such a series of incidents is not directly subjectivity itself, but provides 
pretty good evidence that subjective transformation of the orginal input is
occurring, and that there's a whole set of worlds that can be
traversed, independent to some degree of the environment.  'Hunger' is
being held in a universe which is well-formed (allows almost any
transformation) and independent of its surroundings to some degree.
The subjectivity of being hungry is the experience of being an associative 
process/pseudoentity guided through this (indefinitely rich) world of 
information.  That is difficult to _prove_, but there are strong
indicators.

>|> We have trouble believing that any machine can be conscious because (seeing
>|> the machine from the 'outside') it's tempting to regard the machine as
>|> an objective entity.  But I don't see why one couldn't equip a machine
>|> with a subjective world, which it uses to transform experience and act on
>|> it ...
>
>In this we agree (except that I don't think the machine will be equiped with
>a subjective world, rather it will be equiped with states which can be mapped
>to subjective states, rules about subjective state transformations, rules
>about world, etc.)

I don't know if a rule-based mechanism _could_ show subjectivity -- I think
for a complete space (available for any transformation) whatever it is that
is guiding the trajectory of the 'consciousness' must also be 'conscious'
itself (to a lesser degree, avoiding recursion.)  Rules that are not
themselves 'subjective' to some degree are going to severely limit you.
The possible transformations in a space _are_ the rules, the definitions
of the space -- if your rules are fixed, you are going to have a graph
and not a space -- not all locations will be visitable and your 
asssociations will be severely impoverished.

Not only must the content have meaning, but the meaning of the content
must have a content.  A meaningful content.  (Repeat).

>--gary forbis@u.washington.edu

-- Richard Wesson (departed@netcom.com)

