[Peter Cariani (960502.1200 EST)]
[From Bill Powers (960502.0500 MDT)]
RE: Soft and Hard PCT.The Hard school doesn't think a separate consciousness model is
needed, either because 1) they don't understand that that the
ability to observe their own controlling implies the existence of
an observer system that is separate from the controlling system or
2) they imagine (without demonstration) that one sufficiently
"complex" or "organized" system can be, at the same time, both a
controlling system and the system that is aware of its own
controlling (this strikes me as being like imagining that a
sufficiently complex and organized TV can be, at the same time,
both the producer of an image and the observer of that image).That is extremely well said, except that I think the view which Bruce
dubbed "Soft" is actually the more realistic one, in that it doesn't
offer any explanation that goes beyond what we do understand about
perceptual processes. There is something magical about the idea that
mere complexity or coherence or reverberation can create
a new physical phenomenon that would require us to speak
of awareness or consciousness instead of just signals
moving around in a physical system. It is
"Harder" to admit that while some process of receiving information is
clearly going on in our own experience, we can't explain how this
happens.
However you want to characterize Hard and Soft accounts,
I want to make it very clear that I have always
been very much opposed to the notion that
simply making something more complex confers
onto it special properties. This idea was the implicit
basis of much of symbolic AI and artificial life,
and I think that it is absolutely wrong-headed. The pop-science
literature on "complexity" really turns my stomach, as did all
of the smug AI forecasts that as soon as we have 4 orders of
magnitude more processing power, THEN things
will get interesting and "intelligence" will appear.
"Complexity" and organization are two very different things:
one can have very simple control loops and very complex ones,
but what makes a control loop a control loop, i.e. what gives
it its functional organization is not determined by its
degree of complexity. Isn't this obvious?
Let's not conflate these things.
Secondly, I am not in any way invoking "magical" processes, and
I am not proposing that "new physical phenomena," in the
sense of new basic properties of matter, are being
created by the evolution of functional organizations that
are capable of observation. What does happen is that the
evolution of a particular organization of matter permits there
to be informational operations like "memory" and "modelling
relations" (Pattee, Rosen, Kampis), such that "observers"
are made possible. A rock is not an observer, a cell is a
primitive observer, a human a much more elaborated one.
Thirdly, I keep saying that the existence of another set of
concomitant aspects (or "observables" if you like) of
particular functional organizations does not in any way
<require> us to talk in those terms for the description of
the material systems. One is not "required" to consider a
system as a "control system" in order to describe its
physical workings, and one is not "required" to consider
particle-like properties of light in order to describe its
wave-like properties (interference). Does a system whose
organization is described as a "control system" call into
being new basic properties of matter? No. Might such an
organization permit such a material system to become an
"observer", in some very primitive sense? I think so.
Peter Cariani