Conversations On-Line

24

To:                   Subject: Re: Maxwell's Demon          Date: 03/02/97

'Consciousness ... "Demon,Machine, and Mind" '

Thanks, Al.

The reason I inquired is that I'm preparing a submission for the June conference for the new ASSC group that Bernie Baars is heading up. Patrick Wilken sent a topic list that tends to the empirical: "What does Iimplicit cognition tell us about consciousness?" - and my material is too free wheeling to be acceptable there.

But, in the hopes of making an appearance, I'm taking the article I prepared for Mulhauser's "Evolving Consciousness" and adapting it to the conf topic.   Specifically, my proposal of a new "test" to replace Turing, for evaluating what "is" and "isn't" conscious/ness.

During the past few months I've been haggling with Lawrence Crowell and others in the AdHoc group about nested systems which display "opposite" entropy gradients. I brought it down to the simplest imagery I could think of ... a version of Maxwell's Demon, which deletes the demon and treats the dynamics as nested sets; co-present yet distinctive frames-of-reference - one displaying increasing entropy, the other decreasing, depending on the set boundary chosen. (I think I forwarded a copy or 2 of my discussions to you a few months ago.)

Anyway, it occurred to me that the critical evaluations applied to the Demon scenario are as equally valid and appropriate for a Turing Machine. They are both set-regressive devices. Drawing this connection will provide an entre to the replacement test for consciousness that I propose.

The title is "The Demon, the Machine, and the Mind". It will fit in the conference category: "criteria for the ascription of consciousness".

I have some references and analyses of the demon scenario, but I just wanted to make sure that I didn't miss any important discussions. I hope to make this paper as inclusive and concise as possible.

It should clarify the weaknesses and strengths of AI, but hopefully wrest dominance away from computational-philosophy. What you call assemblies of assemblies, and I call nested entropies, and Mae-Wan Ho calls freedom of organisms in interconnected intercommunicating wholes, and other folks have other names for, are visions of densely involved systems, operating simultaneously.

Consciousness as computation ... even Pen's call for non-computational schemata (and that ilk) ... are too restrictive. Just can't cope with innumerable frames of reference, let alone the information contents involved. Hyper-exponential, factorial, non-abelian amounts.

But that doesn't negate the presence of overall patterns or laws through which all that energy/information *does* get enacted - as real existence.  Simple dynamics. Competent of dealing with even an "immense" amount of Aleph infinites (:->).

Jamie