But that's a misunderstanding of what "having the slightest idea" means. We don't have the slightest idea why matter warps spacetime - but we had a good equation to calculate it. We don't have the slightest idea why charged particles obey fermi statistics - but we can calculate what they do. And when we can make robots that act just as conscious as people and we can design them to be comedians or mathematicians or artists, we still won't have "the slightest idea" how physics gives rises to consciousness at some fundamental level - but nobody will care and the question will seem moot. Brent Meeker On 5/9/2014 6:55 AM, Dan Asimov wrote:
No researcher has the vaguest idea of what consciousness is, and at least at present any scientific progress in this area is inconceivable.
We can analyze the neurological correlates of feelings all we want, and we won't have the slightest idea of how a physical situation gives rise to experiences.
--Dan
On May 9, 2014, at 12:02 AM, Ray Tayek <rtayek@ca.rr.com> wrote:
http://science-beta.slashdot.org/story/14/05/08/1957225/mathematical-model-s...
<http://beta.slashdot.org/%7Etimothy>timothy posted 9 hours ago | from the opposite-would-be-more-suprising dept.
<http://beta.slashdot.org/%7EKentuckyFC>KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "One of the most profound advances in science in recent years is the way researchers from a variety of fields are beginning to formulate the problem of consciousness in mathematical terms, in particular using information theory. That's largely thanks to a relatively <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory>new theory that consciousness is a phenomenon which integrates information in the brain in a way that cannot be broken down. Now a group of researchers has taken this idea further using algorithmic theory to study whether this kind of integrated information is computable. They say that the process of integrating information is equivalent to compressing it. That allows memories to be retrieved but it also loses information in the process. But they point out that this cannot be how real memory works; otherwise, retrieving memories repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay. By assuming that the process of memory is non-lossy, they use algorithmic theory to show that the <https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/898b104158d>process of integrating information must noncomputable. In other words, your PC can never be conscious in the way you are. That's likely to be a controversial finding but the bigger picture is that the problem of consciousness is finally opening up to mathematical scrutiny for the first time."
--- co-chair http://ocjug.org/
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