Hi Neil,

your essay introduces several stimulating points for discussion, but one that I like in particular is the topic of free will, and will power. You attribute special importance to the awareness that we are not computers, a sort of beneficial psychological effect that should help us behaving more effectively in our endeavours . You write:

I also suggest that believing our...

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Hi Neil,

your essay introduces several stimulating points for discussion, but one that I like in particular is the topic of free will, and will power. You attribute special importance to the awareness that we are not computers, a sort of beneficial psychological effect that should help us behaving more effectively in our endeavours . You write:

I also suggest that believing our minds are more than just computers can inspire us, as well as encourage more effective behavior such as the application of "will power."

For the sake of discussion, allow me to express some doubts on this point. Let us consider the sentence: our brain is not just a computer or artificial neural network, it is *more*.

On one hand we have a concept that we understand - the computer, the artificial neural network, or their future, increasingly powerful variants, expected to become so complex that we might even lose control on what they will do. On the other hand we have the totally obscure *more* of `it is more`. The suspect here is that we are trying to please our ego, as humans, by attributing ourselves some unknowable, metaphysical feature that should buy us a higher status, thus more optimistic perspectives for our future.

In some sense, this reminds me of another misuse of the unknown: I refer to the fallacious idea that believing in life after death (with the hope of eternal heaven, or the fear of eternal punishment) should induce humans to behave more correctly.

In the work of Teilhard de Chardin, who was not a computationalist, and was much respectful to transcendence and divinity, the notion of consciousness (with the associated concepts of thought, agency, spontaneity, creativeness, free will) all emerge purely from the growing complexity of matter - an idea that can be formalized, to some extent, by the work of G. Tononi on Integrated Information Theory.

But I am not necessarily opening a discussion on the nature of consciousness here (did you read Hofstadter's "I am A Strange Loop", beside Tegmark's "Our Mathematica Universe"?); I just wanted to confute that the attribution of some metaphysical (or metamagical) status to our consciousness (or our immortality) should make us act more effectively for steering our future on Earth.

Best regards

Tommaso

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Dear Neil,

Your contribution intrigues me and it is a pleasure to come with some remarks.

I fully agree with you that our "morality" has to change deeply from egoistic short time economic thinking to a "sharing" all the goods and energy that we have (sunlight = energy).

Understanding the technique of our material body is in my opinion (like yours) not an end-goal and will not...

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Dear Neil,

Your contribution intrigues me and it is a pleasure to come with some remarks.

I fully agree with you that our "morality" has to change deeply from egoistic short time economic thinking to a "sharing" all the goods and energy that we have (sunlight = energy).

Understanding the technique of our material body is in my opinion (like yours) not an end-goal and will not contribute to a change of mentality, only to a more materialistic understanding leading to more "physical laws" that will lead to a thousand more questions, so that we are more and more busy with "matter". It is my view that "matter does not matter" because it is only a layer of reality, that emerges from what I perceive as Total Simultaneity, where our non-causal consciousness is part of. As Sean Carroll already said "Everything is made of Fields" The Consciousness Field is the catalyst for the "Matter Field" so that the excitation that we remember as matter is created.

I fully agree also with your answer to Tomaso, the growing of humanity has to be controlled, it is as I also mention in my essay that in 50 years we will need another four or five "earth's" to nourish all these individuals, and politics will not be able to solve this problem.

People are not really "stupid" indeed, it is only that because of the great numbers the most stupid as well as the most "wise" are both increasing and it is the first class that when put together have the greatest influence, because the wise man is a silent one...

About your mirror image : each three-dimensional object for instance a cube has three sides you cannot see, however hold it in front of a mirror and you are able to become aware of the whole cube (all six sides) so the mirror image can be a help to have a full perception of three dimensional objects outside yourself. Indeed the left and right are interchanged, it is not a film that you are looking at, to have a good image you need to look into your camera on the computer...and look at the screen...first you are astonished because you are used to look in the mirror.

About your problem with "work", Any "labor" takes time of your life, this time is only once , every minute is a "once in a lifetime" so in principle there is no reference for anybody else to give it a value. They say that people are happy when they work , but I have my doubts, the real problem is that people don't know how to fill their lifetime if they don't have to hunt for deer or labor on their land for vegetables...If mankind changes its mentality perhaps then....

About machines that would be able to think : It is my perception that any computer even how big it might be will never be able to create because the system is binair, it is only BLACK OR WHITE it can choose from, not the infinity number of grey-tones that are in-between, it is our quantum based brain that is able to realize "thinking" because very Planck time there are choices to be made, leading to catalyzing the matter Field, so Descartes could also have said "I think so I create" . I wrote an article that maybe published in COSMOLOGY (depending on review) where I wrote how a "quantum computer could help us to enlarge consciousness I quote it here:

QUOTE

Time-Travel Becomes “ETERNAL -NOW- MOMENT HOPPING”

The splitting in the original Many Worlds I interpretation goes only forward in time, not backwards. In our conception it IS possible that our consciousness "activates" Eternal Now Moments from other time/life-lines (or from parallel available universes) . Should this mean that time travel is possible ? Yes but...should we call this phenomenon time-travel ?

What we are understanding as time-travel in this causal time/life line always leads to the well-known paradoxes like killing your grand-father. (What a mentality !!!) These paradoxes however are no longer problematic when we apply the perception of Total Simultaneity. Then time-travel in the past and/or the future would become ENM-Hopping, and the so called “physical” time/life-line (in our memory) continues normally. Our consciousness is able not only to hop from one ENM to another but also line up these ENM’s and in this way creating for itself the best possible past and future, Real Free Will resides in TS.

The extension of our Free Will lies in the extension of our consciousness and so in a closer contact with our NCC in order to realize more choices in the ENM availabilities. We think that the a future coupling of the quantum-computer and our brain will be an opening.

In the article “Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules...” 16 Prof. Nick E. Mavromatos, proposed that :

“For the first time there is concrete evidence for quantum entanglement over relatively large distances in living matter at ambient temperature, which suggests a rather non-trivial role of quantum physics in path optimization for energy and information transport” :

(http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/329/1/012026) (14) ,

It becomes clear that quantum entanglement and decoherence time, which are for the construction and the operational qualities of quantum computers the main issues, these qualities are are already available in our own brains inside the Cell Microtubules (MT).

(decoherence = The particles that make up a computer interact with surroundings, so that information is spreading out, which means: this effect is spoiling quantum computations, (to decohere = lose their quantum properties)).

Regarding the “macroscopic” aspect : Recent experiments on atoms in salt crystals have shown that an amount of 1020 atoms formed a hugely entangled state. Vlatko Vedral in “Living in a Quantum World” (Scientific American , June 2011) and “Progress Article Quantifying entanglement in Macroscopic Systems” (June 2008 Nature 453, 1004-1007 : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7198/full/nature0
7124.html .(21). Quantum Bit Storage is advancing not only in the macroscopic way but now also scientists have succeeded to retrieve coherent information for extended times (39 minutes) at room-temperature. See Kamyar Saeedi et al in “Room-Temperature Quantum Bit Storage Exceeding 39 Minutes Using Ionized Donors in Silicon-28” http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6160/830 (22)

Our brains are RWA (Ready Willing and Able) to perform quantum states that when brought in coherence with a quantum computer. This will enable us to realize “ENM-Hopping”.

UNQUOTE

So you see this one of the possibilities (I hope)

I also hope that you will find some time to read my essay : "STEERING THE FUTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS ?", because as you are also a broad interested man we sure have perceptions in common, so I wonder what your comment on my thread will be and maybe you will be able to rate my contribution in accordance to your appreciation.

(full article for Cosmology is attached I hope it works..)

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My essay deals with the issue of real human minds versus machine-minds. One of the classic attempts to show that AI protocols don't produce real thinking and consciousness is John Searle's "Chinese Room." In it, an operator has a mass of notes describing how to output "reasonable sounding" (pass Turing Test) answers in Chinese, to questions in Chinese. Searle and "mysterians" such as myself say,...

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My essay deals with the issue of real human minds versus machine-minds. One of the classic attempts to show that AI protocols don't produce real thinking and consciousness is John Searle's "Chinese Room." In it, an operator has a mass of notes describing how to output "reasonable sounding" (pass Turing Test) answers in Chinese, to questions in Chinese. Searle and "mysterians" such as myself say, no the CR does not really understand Chinese. (It's a separate issue, which I tackle in my own essay, whether simulating the neurons directly - rather than the overall process - can actually be done to create real consciousness. I say no to that, as well.) I thought of some further refinements about the Chinese Room which readers should fine interesting. Anyone heard of anything like the "Addition Room" below?

Searle says, the CR doesn't really "understand" Chinese because of course, he means something more than just producing the output - why else emphasize the alternative way the CR does its job? (Again, it is "the system," the virtual mind, that is claimed not to understand. We knew the human operator doesn't know Chinese - let's put that straw man to rest.) His critics say, yes it does, because they (in simple essence) define "understanding" as performance. Searle's objections have little chance against a near tautology, built for convenience rather than insight. Any challenge involving "it produces X, but ...." will be taken as "understanding," yet the "but" will be ignored. Even Ned Block's similar "blockhead" xxx is absorbed. But being able to do things is ... being able to do them. You can't force coverage or co-option of other intended meanings or phenomena through announcement or circular definitions. Instead, let's reconsider afresh whether such behavior should always be taken as "understanding."

First, it is too easy to let the CR give only generic answers. Ask the CR personal questions about itself, and seek elaboration, such as (in translation): "what is your favorite color? Are your feelings easily hurt? Do you approve of GMOs? Do you have a religious faith? What were your unspoken thoughts a minute ago? Imagine an animal, what does it look like?" Ah, now what? Answers would be lies in effect, or at least empty falsehoods. The process designer needs to construct a plausible but imaginary subjective "self," with a history, to go with "understanding Chinese." Isn't that more to do, with deeper implications? Who decides what is credible - the educated public, or canny psychologists? Then, what about describing noises, external things - that can't be programmed into the CR. Understanding Chinese means being able to talk about what you're looking at, or a theorem you just thought of.

The functionalist critique is wearing thin. What if we defenders of the CR say: really understanding Chinese means capability to give honest answers to all questions? (To keep the "game" game, we can exclude direct distinctions etc.) Yes, "how can we tell," but it's also game to pose this conceptual distinction and to show where one is coming from. Perhaps the following is the ultimate refinement: can we teach French to the CR? It seems the programmer would have to include all possible languages, since the CR cannot pick them up "naturally." That final task looks truly undoable, at last. And a real mind that can understand Chinese, can learn French or a newly invented language. This gets sticker and stickier for functionalists once we try harder to make their job harder.

Now consider something simpler and perhaps decisive: the "Addition Room." The AR stores all answers to integer addition questions like, 7 + 5 = ? (within some range.) It does not do any computation. So, someone inputs A + B. The AR operator (a Chinese peasant who never learned Arabic numerals) just looks up the question on a table, finds the answer stored by it, and sends that out. "Look, I put in 7 plus 5 and got 12. This thing can add." Really? Sure it gives you the answer, we stipulated that - but should we accept "addition" being literally defined as just coming up with the answers? How about defining "doing addition" as truly calculating the answer, by computational summing of the inputs. The system does not know how to add. It provides the answer without "doing addition." It comes down to: if either A or B can produce C, I get to pick which of the first I mean by "doing X." (For overall meaning, priority wins.) Now the irony: the AR isn't even a true computational intelligence. How can you agree, "the Addition Room doesn't really do addition"; but say "the Chinese Room really does understand Chinese" - ? Delving deeper, what if we imagined that real computation produced some kind of "experience", that just looking up answers did not?

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