Originally posted by sonhouse One problem with the objective reality bit, not real unless it's observed, what about when there was no life forms anywhere in our universe, say when it was a couple of years old. There were for sure nobody to observe it but I get the feeling the universe didn't give a crap if an intelligence was looking or not, it just kept on doing it's thing, expanding, cooling off, etc.
Originally posted by sonhouse You would have to come to the conclusion it would not be sound if say, you had a symphony orchestra of mindless robots who can be programmed to be virtuoso's on whatever instrument they play and so 50 or 60 of them playing together with a mindless robot conductor and they start playing but they are in the middle of a desert with no people around, they they would not be generating sound, right?
Correct, they would not be making sound. "Sound" is the output of a complex interpretative process that happens in your brain when it is fed input in the form of vibrations through your ears. So the robots would be making vibrations, but unless there were someone (or something) around equipped to interpret these vibrations as sound, there would be no sound.
This may seem strange, but I think that's only because our brains process the information imperceptibly quickly so it seems as if there is no disconnect between the vibration and the resulting sound output. The brain actually makes mince-meat of some spectacularly complex (and fundamentally intractable) calculations to organize the vibrations into something coherent we call "sound". It does something very similar with the light pattern input captured by your eyes. There's a great explanation of how the sound works in the following book:
"This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession"
by Daniel J. Levitin
Originally posted by sonhouse That's why I said 'intelligence', a more generalized term, however it can come about. You are of the opinion the universe is self aware?
'You are of the opinion the universe is self aware?[/b]'
More or less yes. I would say at its most fundamental level the universe is pure undifferentiated consciousness.
Originally posted by clearlight Yes but consciousnes does not come from brains.
I dissagree here. I believe that consciousness is a result of the processing that our brains do.
Where do you think consciousness comes from?
And yes, sound is our conscious perception caused by the electrical stimulous in our brains that have come from the nerves in our ears when air vibrations hit them.
The colour blue is how our brains interpret electromagnetic waves of a particular length when they hit the cones in our eyes. It is a totally subjective experience.
A deaf person may feel the air vibrations of a bass note but they do not hear a sound. The signals from our ears give a very different experience from that given by our skin.
Originally posted by clearlight 'You are of the opinion the universe is self aware?'
More or less yes. I would say at its most fundamental level the universe is pure undifferentiated consciousness.[/b]
In our brains, thought is generated by the movement of ions down the wires of neurons, in a conscious universe, what would be the analog of thoughts there?
Originally posted by AThousandYoung I don't know what "information processing" means. Computers are not aware as far as we know.
Perhaps I didn't find the right expression. I didn't want to use any word referring to nervous tissue, because then we limit ourselves to Earthly life.
If computers in far future can have awareness is another topic, that I don't want to go into for now.
Originally posted by FabianFnas Perhaps I didn't find the right expression. I didn't want to use any word referring to nervous tissue, because then we limit ourselves to Earthly life.
If computers in far future can have awareness is another topic, that I don't want to go into for now.
You're right. The nature of conciousness, awareness, intelligence, etc is a weak part of our science at this time. I suspect there are general principles that would allow for such things without nervous tissue but that's just speculation. In fact 100% of the time we've only observed such things coming from beings with nervous tissue and the amount of awareness seems to be intimately correlated with the structure and amount of nervous tissue present.
In any case, I'd expect to see some similarities between what we know about how intelligence-creating nervous tissue looks and behaves and the computer or other alternate potential source of intelligence. The moon doesn't have any kind of analogous structures. Does it?
Originally posted by AThousandYoung You're right. The nature of conciousness, awareness, intelligence, etc is a weak part of our science at this time. I suspect there are general principles that would allow for such things without nervous tissue but that's just speculation. In fact 100% of the time we've only observed such things coming from beings with nervous tissue and the amount ...[text shortened]... source of intelligence. The moon doesn't have any kind of analogous structures. Does it?
It might be premature to write off computers as capable of being self aware and such, being 'sentient'. The latest test of self awareness, self recognition looking at oneself in a mirror, has been show in the british bird called the Magpie, an ordinary bird, adding to the list that now includes chimps and other apes, south Asian elephants, dolphins and now these birds. It was thought this self awareness was in the neo-cortex but the magpie has no such thing in its brain so that alone has the scientists involved scratching their heads over that one. What that means in terms of computers is this: computer scientists have already pretty much completely simulated half a mouse brain, a very significant achievement but the bird brain has less complexity than the mouse so it should be easier to simulate on a computer. That is just conjecture on my part but it does seem to suggest that Kurtzweil is closer to the truth than most people think Ala his book 'The coming age of Spiritual machines'.
13 Aug '08 14:48
A quantum experiment by Feynman:
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