My partner and I presented ‘Google Consciousness’ at TEDx in cardiff this year, and apparently the talk has tapped into something. Something I think perhaps you could shed more light on in certain areas than I. It has gone viral (as somewhat predicted in the talk) and has remained the number 1 most popular talk over on ted with over 130k views in a month and counting.

In spite of all this, I think you will probably hate it but wanted to thank you for your wonderful work and invite you to watch it none the less.

http://www.tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxCARDIFF-Google-Consciousnes;Most-popular

Even more so in the modern politically-correct, watch-your-mouth, society. Most of what people say is the de facto response expected of them in any given situation.

I can’t even count the numbers of times I’ve heard friends and family toss out ideas of how they would spend their money if they win the lottery. It’s almost always the same from everyone; take care of my kids, by my mother a car, buy a house, take a year off work and travel, then come back and set up a small business for retirement.

It’s at the point where we don’t even need to listen to each other because the entire script can be seen from the outset.

Can you have reasoning and understanding without language? Is it possible to have a pure intuition based meaningful conscious experience, or some language structure is always needed to support the meaning?

When I think of this I usually get in dead-lock loop. I believe sometimes it is possible to intuitively approach a mental scene, I think it is sometimes refered as an innate grasp of understanding.

I was agreeing with you. Computation as a mathematical theory is, as I understand it, effectively a theory of the relationship of symbol sets and is entirely syntactical. It is just not possible to create semantic from syntax, so it is impossible to create meaning from computation. Anybody who has programmed a computer would know that the meaning or intention of a program cannot be discerned from looking at the code (source or binary, comments excluded).

The meaning can only be discerned by consuming the output of the program which will be in a physical form for full comprehension by a human. The analogy is with electric pulses down telephone lines. They may be meaningless in themselves, but they enable communication. That is what computer programs are : a form of communication, like telephones. In fact of course, most telephone communication is done via computer programs these days, so the analogy is even more apt.

“all computing is just observer-relative, based upon rules relating arbitrary physical markers to syntactical symbols”

I completely agree with you. I am not sure if I would say that syntactical symbols are the right term, but there has to be some kind of “meaning substrate”. I would say: “all computing is just observer-relative, based upon rules relating arbitrary physical markers to meaningful symbols”. In my opinion, “meaning” is a key concept to make a difference between “conscious entities” and “conscious like entities”: AI systems, or humans acting subconsciously.

Isn’t this the point ? That there are no computers in nature at all ? Nothing that can be referred to as a ‘phenomeonoligical, intrinsic computer’, as all computing is just observer-relative, based upon rules relating arbitrary physical markers to syntactical symbols ?

Even to say that a certain behaviour is the result of a computation can be questioned. And to say that consciousness is the result of a computation is definitely a matter of opinion. Lloyd will probably support that idea, I don’t.

What I am saying is that Fred is just nothing but an object of your imagination, you could imagine that Fred is an “blade runner like” humanoid, would that make a change? Fred is not a zombie eithe.

Think of this: Could Fred (the one in your mind) have his own imagination? his own feelings and emotions? his own “will”? No, its existence completely depends on you. Fred is just an object in your mind, like a flowerpot could be, for example.

So the point is that even accepting the validity of your thought experiment, Fred is not executing any computations on his own.

Now, you could say that that behavior of “Fred” does not correspond to a real Fred because the computation needed to do it is classed as “pretending”, but that would seem to have the risk of implying that Fred is a Zombie. You would seem to be saying that Fred is a zombie because the wrong mechanisms are being used to produce him. That is all that this question was about – whether or not we reject the existence of certain conscious minds, when we know that their apparent existence is merely caused by certain types of computation that involve another conscious mind.