On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

The question, if my model works well as a practical view of AI, is whether or not it might also have something to say about our intelligence. We're back to what the difference between AI as in artificial, and AI as in actual - could be? If there's a difference, it doesn't seem like it would be the effect. More like a difference in process. Would you agree to that?

It depends whether you consider the subjective experience of qualia an effect. I'm not convinced that any amount of processing, of any type, necessarily causes or implies actual subjective experience a la qualia. But if you're talking input/processing/output (i.e. the only things we can observe in each other), then I'd say we're only talking about a difference of process-- and that the details of that process shouldn't matter.

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Entropy destroys the detail intricacies. So on large scales like a galaxy, you only have to worry about gravity and not how many supernova's went off.

I think there's an exception-- mind. Along Rhythm's lines, you could see a mind as a kind of transistor of unlimited power. A single mind could, based on just a little information, decide to push a big red button and destroy a planet. Or that same information could be that last drop in the bathtub that draws a "Eureka!" and changes the mental functioning of billions of beings through the spread of a new idea.

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I don;t know how such a thing would define anything (as I'm not such a thing). Perhaps you should ask the mind spawning universe that question? I'm a patient man....we might not get the answer back to quick on that count, eh?

No, we are unlikely to get that answer.

So to answer the question: "What causes mind to exist rather than not," how can you separate any given complex physical system as a meaningful processor (and therefore having a mind) and any other system as not? It seems to me that all particles in the universe are necessarily brought into relation with each other, and that any randomly-selected set of particles, no matter where they are, could be seen as outputting "meaningful" results.