re consciousness part ii kev strikes back in article apr ousrvr oulu fi kempmp phoenix oulu fi petri pihko writes kevin anthoney kax cs nott ac uk wrote this post is probably either brilliant or insane do let me know which a brilliant example of using the introspective objection against materialist theories of consciousness diplomatic i realize i m fighting occam s razor in this argument so i ll try to explain why i feel a mind is necessary firstly i m not impressed with the ability of algorithms they re great at solving problems once the method has been worked out but not at working out the method itself as a specific example i like to solve numerical crosswords not the simple do the sums and insert the answers type the hard ones to do these with any efficiency you need to figure out a variety of tricks now i know that you can program a computer to do these puzzles but in doing so you have to work out the tricks yourself and program them into the computer you can of course obfuscate the trick and write the program so that it is uncovered but as far as i can see the trick still has to be there in some form to be discovered does this mean that all the ideas we will ever have are already pre programmed into our brains this is somewhat unlikely given that our brains ultimately are encoded in chromosomes worth of genetic material much of which isn t used one way around this is to bring the environment into the equation but again as far as i can see this still has an air of if you see object x then perform action y and we don t seem to get anywhere the algorithm has to anticipate what it might see and what conclusions to draw from it s experience the other problem with algorithms is their instability not many algorithms survive if you take out a large portion of their code yet people survive strokes without going completely haywire there are side effects but patients still seem remarkably stable also neurons in perfectly healthy people are dying at an alarming rate can an algorithm survive if i randomly corrupt various bits of it s code the next problem is the sticky question of what is colour replace colour with the sensation of your choice presumably the materialist viewpoint is that it s the product of some kind of chemical reaction the usual products of such a reaction are energy different chemicals is colour a mixture of these if this is so a computer won t see colour because the chemistry is different does an algorithm that sees colour have a selective advantage over an equivalent that doesn t it shouldn t because the outputs of each algorithm ought to be the same in equivalent circumstances so why do we see colour however such a view is actually a nonsolution how should minds be able to act as observers feel pain and pleasure and issue commands any better than the brain moreover how do the interactions occur a bit of idle speculation if i remember correctly quantum mechanics consists of a wavefunction with two processes acting on it the first process has been called unitary evolution or u is governed by schroedinger s equation and is well known the second process called various things such as collapse of the wavefunction or state vector reduction or r and is more mysterious it is usually said to occur when a measurement takes place although nobody seems to know precisely when that occurs when it does occur the effect of r is to abruptly change the wavefunction i envisage r as an interaction between the wavefunction and something else which i shall imaginitively call part x it seems reasonable to assume that something causes r although that something might be the wavefunction itself in which case part x is simply the wavefunction note though that we d need more than u to explain r anyway i m speculating that minds would be in part x there seems to be some link between consciousness and r in that we never see linear superpositions of anything although there are alternative explainations for this i ve no idea how a brain is supposed to access part x but since this is only speculation that won t matter too much my main point is that there might be a place for minds in physics i ll go back to my nice padded cell now if that s ok with you petri kevin anthoney kax cs nott ac uk don t believe anything you read in sig files
