It's so sad that I'm alergic to spring : ( Well happy Noruz!!

Today was the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and all the anti-Bush movements where gathered in the City Hall square. It was like seeing the other side of the coin.

One of the main goals of Searle’s class is to read and critique classical papers on consciousness. So I want to sum up what I’ve seen (or Searle has shown us) so far:

There’s an urge toward physicalism/materialism in one hand and a feeling that we’re not computers. So some papers try to show how physicalism is not enough and some to show how we can understand consciousness computationally (which is the latest version of physicalism!).  Arguments against physicalism try to show with easily understandable examples (Chinese room, what it’s like to be a bat, what Marry didn’t know, absent of qualia) how you can have all the physical properties and still not be conscious. Also they all define qualia as something that is not duplicate able by physicalism (!) and use that to show how it can’t give an account for the main feature of consciousness.

As a prediction I think consciousness is a feature of an information processing system; and even if it’s not we’ll still understand to be such!

به کجاها برد اين اميد ما را

نشد اين عاشق سرگشته صبور نشد اين مرغک پربسته رها

به هوايت همه جا در همه حال به اميدی بگشايم شب و روز پر و بال

غم عشقت دل ما را به کجاها برد ما را  

چه دانستم که اين سودا مرا زين سان کند مجنون

دلم را دوزخی سازد٬ دو چشمم را کند جيحون

چه دانستم که سيلابی مرا ناگاه بربايد

چو کشتی ام دراندازد ميان قُلزم پرخون

زند موجی بر آن کشتی که تخته تخته بشکافد

که هر تخته فرو ريزد ز گردش های گوناگون

نهنگی هم بر آرد سر٬ خورد آن آب دريا را

چنان دريای بی پايان٬ شود بی آب چون هامون

شکافد نيز آن هامون؛ نهنگ بحر فرسا را٬

کشد در قعر ناگاهان به دست قهر چون قارون

چو اين تبديل ها آمد٬ نه هامون ماند و نه دريا

چه دانم من دگر چون شد؛ که چون غرق است در بی چون

چه دانم های بسيار است٬ ليکن من نمی دانم

که خوردم از دهان بندی٬ در آن دريا کفی افيون

و من صدای آبشار را شنيدم

هواپيمايی که ميبينم

بوی شکوفه ای که در هواهست

مرا غمگين ميکند

آسمان بلند است و هوا آبستن توست.

زان شبی که وعده کردی روز وصل

روز و شب را می شمارم روز و شب

After these past days of longing, impatience and desperation; tonight was a cold and exciting breeze with a hard rain after a long talk with you: it cheered me up. I like to be exposed to the nature, to be vulnerable.

If you look at the description of biological immune system, you will notice that one can explain it without referring to biological terms, but using entities, their properties and characteristics, states and interactions between entities in different states. This sort of explanation if the result of a system design, and one that can be implemented on different platforms. In my view a good approach to explaining and understanding consciousness will entail such steps. Of coarse the problem is that 1) the biological (or neural) correlates of these entities involved are vague 2) the system itself is little known to us, we have little reference as to what sort of entities will have to interact within what sort of framework.

So in other word, I would take NCC to mean that each entities of the consciousness system design will correlate with which specific system in the brain. To map consciousness to our brain, an abstract layer of system design is required.

I saw the definition given in the program of the ASSC conference and liked it. This definition was something that made sense to me: “specific system in the brain whose activity correlates directly with states of conscious experience”. The part that I got my attention was the term “system” which implies that a consciousness is the result of a system and if we want to know how a biological agent can be conscious, we have to find a correlate system in it’s neural system.

As I read Chalmers, Nagel, Searle and Dreyfus’s articles I was surprised that there was no mention of the role of “I”, “the interpreter”, “the very conscious agent”. What I saw missing was the wondering: if pain is this system of state of neurons, who is it conscious for and what account of it do we have?

Yesterday I liked Searle again, he talked and was challenged and mentioned views that I had always thought to be amazing: how we organize the world, create semantic objects, establish relation between a word and a piece of reality or imagination, bottom-up causation and the like. I thought his book Rationality in Action would be good!

One of the things that I wanted to write about is (and I think I’ll write this one first!): show two pictures of mind in general and consciousness in particular, that have been suggested computationally (Solomon’s Meta Management) and biologically (Baar’s Stage) and see what category they fall into philosophically (Claim: Mind Design). I think both of them are the right way to understand consciousness and I want to show that in a philosophical language and to discuss what philosophical analysis can contribute to them. 

First I will list principles that I take for granted:

1-     Searle’s four basic and obvious slogans:

a.      Minds are real.

b.     Brains cause minds.

c.      Minds have causal effects on real world.

d.    

2-     Mind Design:

a.      What is meant by “system design”. For this I will draw to Minsky’s definition. And the definition used in software engineering.

b.     What advantages Mind Design has as a framework to study consciousness:

                                                    i.     An objective

                                                  ii.     Solomon’s ideas

                                                iii.     Summary of what I have so far thought about it.

To show that they are two of the right ways to go, I will have to:

1-     They satisfy Searle’s four basic and obvious slogans, and therefore they are not subject to many of the philosophical difficulties. Searle’s slogans are guidelines that will keep a design fruitful.

2-     To show how they are a system design. This step includes:

a.      How they are the abstract layer between behavior and brain.

b.     How they show that consciousness is the result of different entities with specific tasks, properties and the relations between them.

I’m coming back from Palo Alto, waiting for your call in the train. After work Paul, Anurag, Shahriar, Chris and I went to a micro bar in Palo Alto. It was fun, we talked, they drank, and if it wasn’t Friday you would’ve called.    

Wow Caramel Patchiato coffee tastes great; even this Coffee Lid has patent number. A tasty drink makes me feel my body better. Anyway I missed the train again. We planned for nine nights and 7 days, meeting in a third country. Wow, countdown, heart race, aching, longing, sudden smiles.

Because Visa Center  is closed.

Supervenience: A relation that holds on some domain such that it’s impossible that there is a difference in higher level properties without a difference in their lower level properties.

Question: what if evolution had taken another road and in that world there was no consciousness; when comparing that world to ours, at what level would the cause of this difference reveal itself? At what level of the hierarchy of properties (from lower level to higher level), difference would show?

Consciousness

Brain

Biological

Physical

So if evolution had indeed taken another road, we should infer from supervenience that all these lower level properties must have been different? Or is brain a device that was not implemented and therefore we did not have the apparatus for consciousness? Or because (hypothetically) it had no evolutionary value, it never got the chance to develop.

I think each lower level property creates a space of possible design of the higher level properties. Or you can say the space of possible designs of the world is limited for a designer as each level of properties is realized.

So the relation between each two level is not a on-to-one relation, but many-to-many. Science would say yes the world could have been different and technology would say we’ll make it. So starting from each level of properties, technology has a space of possible designs to work on. Imagine if nature had decided to go from physical properties to electronic entities (a design taken by humans) and come to the next higher level.

Consciousness is not the property of any physical-level entity.

Since physics has been the favorite science of philosophers, Searle sees the final theory and knowledge about consciousness, as a formula. But physics is not a very good model for consciousness. I think the final model will be a system design independent from the biological implementation. This system design will include involved entities with descriptions of their properties, tasks, interactions and … Something more like the description that we have for the immune system (TBA).

To know NF378 = consciousness is not to know how consciousness works. To learn about consciousness, a theory laden concept, we have to have a design of it. Something similar to analyzing the immune system. Immunity of the body is not signature generation of T-Cells; but it’s the result of interaction of different entities interacting.

But a description of “the ability to give a description of it within a short period of time” is good.

تحويل تو، هوف هوف، من ديگه ميرم ميخوابم.

You really are my mentor and proud to say of yourself! This horrible day and sinking sensation of desperation is over and we're awake again, ready to go, endure, learn and embrace!

:(

فکر کنم يکی از شرايطی که آدم خيلی دلش تنگ ميشود، وقتی است که ميخواهد کاری کند و کيلومترها اجازه نميدهند. من امروز چند کيلومتر فاصله داشتم؟

Since I have to carry PassMark Security’s notebook with me, I get to write more to you on the train. Last Tuesday I attended RSA Conference 2005 in Moscone Center, SF. It was so exciting, I got the chance to see two people in Cryptographer’s Panel that I thought of them, at the moment, as my role models: I want to become like them (the R and the S in the RSA; Rivest and Shamir).

Before this panel, Bill Gates as the first key note speaker, opened his lecture by showing a slide of a piece of paper he left at another conference while sitting beside Belier, and how the pressed thought it was Belier’s and that he was nervous and had his new password on it and … People liked it. The rest was about how Microsoft is providing integrated security solutions for the individuals and businesses: anti spy ware,  SMS, update centers, IE 7.0, SP2 and …

I went to PassMark Security’s booth after that circled around the exhibition and came back for Thompson, another keynote speaker from Symantec. He was serious and aggressive, no slides or notes, just walked around and talked about availability beside security and the importance of third party intelligent.

Cryptographers Panel was a friendly panel and a popular one too. Rivest, Shamir, Diffie from Sun and Kocher sat there while Burt from RSA showed clips of their predictions at the RSA Conference from 1990 to 2003, asking them to give a follow up!

To me the exhibition haul seemed magnificent: RSA, VeriSign, Symantec and all the big names gathered in a “I don’t know what to call it” air. But others found it to be boring!

I’ll see you next year at San Jose.

Introduction:

It is true what Nagel says: “if physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character (what is like to be that agent) it seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that any objective physical theory will abandon that point of view.”

But why is that? I claim this is a result of the way Nagel is looking at the “way to describe consciousness”. He sees consciousness as a phenomenon, and tries to understand it after it has happened, taken a subjective way of being which is only epistemologically accessible to us. While this is in a sense true (and in the sense that Searle explains, false), I do not think it exhausts the possible “ways to describe consciousness”.

Stand point of design is another view which can provide an objective analysis of consciousness. From this view, we can objectively ask: how can I design a mind that every experience of it will be essentially connected to a single point of view? Mind design view looks at a mind from the objective perspective of an architect, and like Searle says, it is not a question of that but it’s a matter of how. Mind Design View is objective since a design is independent of it’s implementations and instances. Like Searle describes the aim of his writings on consciousness, naturalizing the complex concept of consciousness, a mind design is the naturalized replacement for “Nature of Mind”.

As Searle says, consciousness is a higher level property of the brain, and to link between the lower level properties and higher level one is a design.

An Example

We know that a network analyzer program’s behavior is caused by a sequence of differences in voltage 0 and 5. This knowledge alone is never enough to understand how that program works, also there are tens of levels abstraction between them. Each level of implementation is based on the presumption that homunculi of lower layer will carry out the desired task. So to understand how a network analyzer works, we can start by listing what it “must” be able to do, assuming that lower level homunculi will carry it out. And at their level the same methodology applies. Even on the level of 0,1 we still assume that lower level homunculi are creating that difference.

Mind Design View

Mind design view is about One: levels of abstraction; Two: dependency of each level on the homunculi of the lower level.

Mind Design View ~ Our Mind

Mind Design counts on the available implementations of consciousness as a source of inspiration, ideas and understanding; and also as a test environment for the design.

I think the good approach to mind design, is applying Dennett’s solution or explanation for the homunculus fallacy about consciousness: at each level, dumber/less conscious homunculus will produce the higher level concept. At this level of explanation your not worried how those dumber homunculi are actually implemented.

I found this approach best applied in Barr’s global workspace theory: his theory has three level of abstraction; at one level his dealing with the abstract and somehow common description of consciousness; with definitions like what consciousness is, analogies of how it works and the like. At the second layer, he introduces different entities and how they interact: coalitions, priority … and on the third layer he tries to give account of how they are realized in the given implementation: the brain; in terms of neuron firings and …

Reduction

Now let’s approach it from another perspective: Nagel, when trying to explain under what conditions reduction of a phenomenon can take place, states that this process “can be accomplished by reducing our dependence or individual or species-specific point of view” about that phenomenon. “It is possible to follow this path because although our ideas and concepts we employ in thinking about the outside world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves. Therefore we can abandon that point of view in favor of an objective one and still be thinking about the same thing”. He then argues that consciousness and experience do not meet this condition because abandoning the particularity of our humanly point of view in favor of a more objective one, because of the subjective characteristic of it, will take us away from the real nature of consciousness.

Again we can see how Design point of view, will give an objective account of consciousness, while leaving the subjective characteristic of it unreduced. Mind Design will objectively show how subjective characteristic of consciousness can be realized for each individual.