Chip with simple program for Toy

[Coleston]

On May 17, 12:42 pm, Rich Grise <r...@example.net> wrote:

Crossposted to sci.electronics.design,sci.electronics.basics ;
followups-to set to sci.electronics.basics.

I found a 556 in my junque box, and thought it'd be fun to flash an LED or
something, but I only need one half of it. I know unterminated inputs are
anathema for digital chips, but what about the spare half of a 556? From
the schem. on the data sheet,http://www.national.com/pf/LM/LM556.htmlhttp://www.national.com/ds.cgi/LM/LM556.pdf
it kinda looks like pulling them to either rail might be not too good for
the chip - what do you guys recommend?

Thanks!
Rich

Tie the inputs together and have the output go through a large
resistor, like 100K to ground. That should do the trick nicely.

 

[JeffM]

Rich Grise wrote:

I know unterminated inputs are anathema for digital chips,

Only so far as they affect the output.

but what about the spare half of a 556?
From the schem. on the data sheet[...]it kinda looks
like pulling them to either rail might be not too good for the chip

Just tie Reset (actually !RESET) low.

 

[Rich Grise]

On Thu, 17 May 2007 16:42:21 +0000, Rich Grise wrote:

Crossposted to sci.electronics.design,sci.electronics.basics ;
followups-to set to sci.electronics.basics.

I found a 556 in my junque box, and thought it'd be fun to flash an LED or
something, but I only need one half of it. I know unterminated inputs are
anathema for digital chips, but what about the spare half of a 556? From
the schem. on the data sheet,
http://www.national.com/pf/LM/LM556.html
http://www.national.com/ds.cgi/LM/LM556.pdf
it kinda looks like pulling them to either rail might be not too good for
the chip - what do you guys recommend?

Thanks everyone for your answers. Now all I have to do is get up off my
dead butt and breadboard the thing.

Thanks!
Rich

 

[Charlie Siegrist]

Circa 17 May 2007 06:37:52 -0700 recorded as
<1179409072.270588.170980@h2g2000hsg.googlegroups.com> looks like Homer
<homi_us@hotmail.com> sounds like:

Hi All,

I am planning to light up 178 LEDs (3.4V-3.8V, 25MA) using a 18V/1A
Adapter (DC radio shack transformer) and I need a little help.

Snipped the discussion about the unregulated voltage adapter, as that
question seems to have been well covered. I have a different concern with
your project.

If you take the 25mA as a typical 'on' value for each LED, and you want to
use 178 of them, then you must calculate the total typical power that will
be consumed by the circuit. That number is 178 * 3.8V * 0.025A = 16.91W.
You are on the ragged edge of the ability of your supply (18W rated) to
deliver the load, and have not yet factored in the power that will be
consumed by the current limiting resistors, one of which will be required
in each parallel leg of the circuit.

Furthermore, the design is limited to using no more than 40 parallel legs,
i.e. 0.025A * 40 = 1A. 178 / 40 = 4.45, meaning that you will have to have
half of your parallel legs with four LED's and half with five. 5 * 3.5V =
17.5V, so again you are topping out your design specs without counting the
voltage drops of the limiting resistors.

In short, I think you need more source power or less load consumption.
You've got no "wiggle room."

 

[K]

This is a Fucking Scam, all they want to do is loan you money!! No
Pictures.,Pricks!

K


<Goofy.throat3@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1179465965.514213.95050@l77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...

Download http://scargo.in Lindsay Lohans Tits free tits and videos!
MUST CLICK! I mean see... .

 

[Daniel Mandic]

Radium wrote:

On May 2, 7:43 pm, MooseFET <kensm...@rahul.net> wrote in
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.comp.hardware.homebuilt/msg/428a95f
3947950ee?hl=en& :

On May 1, 11:46 pm, Radium <gluceg...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi:

Below is an example of "parallel Hz"

http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/2427/clocksignalexample8is.gif

If each clock signal is 1 Hz, and you have a billion of them,
staggered such that every 1ns part of the CPU can start, and
finish, an instruction - making the effective 'clock rate' 1 GHz.

With a billion CPUs, theleakage currentwould kill you. If you want
real processing speed at low power, you should look at using 3 phase
clocks. There are several advantages to this. You only have to
swap two lines of the 3 phase clock to invert the order. This
means that the processor can back step. It doesn't really make a
general purpose computer but it would be very handy if you were
playing jeopardy.

Just out of curiosity, lets say [hypothetically], I had a PC that used
laseronics [photonics using lasers and without any LEDs] in place of
electronics. If this laseronic computer uses "parallel-Hz" would it
run into something similar to "leakage current"? If so, what is the
optical equivalent of leakage current?


Thanx,

Radium

Erm...


For me in the meantime it would be enough, when my actual Soundblaster
Live! Platinum would sound like my AWE64 Gold.
That new card sounds awfully crap when playing high-end ripped wavs...!
I don't want to listen the rest of all that bloat (narrow, treble
encumbered and flat MP3-like sound-quality).



Kind Regards,

Daniel Mandic

 

[K]

Fuck You!


<penis.Mosely8@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1179517461.654702.16940@p77g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...

http://nudepicks.blogspot.com/2007/05/us-education-official-testifies-before.html
- Download all these hot nude pics!!

 

[Joerg]

joseph2k wrote:

billcalley wrote:


Hi All,

I will be tasked with finding the proper Zin and Zout for a 1W RF
power transistor's maximum Pout, gain, and PAE on a Maury load-pull
station, but something has just occurred to me: won't any results
coming from such a PA load-pull tuning method be relatively
inaccurate? The reason why I say this is that the final (non-linear)
PA circuit, when eventually placed in the RF transmitter itself, will
be seeing a bandpass filter and/or an antenna, both of which mean that
the PA will no longer be seeing the very wideband 50 ohm termination
it saw in the load-pull tuning station. This means that the non-
linear's PA harmonics will be strongly reflecting back off of the
filter's and/or antenna's stopbands and back into the PA's output,
affecting its PAE, stability, gain, etc. Aren't I correct about
this? And if so, how do I address this problem??

Thanks for any help!

-Bill

personally i am much opposed to using non-linear amplifiers without truly
compelling requirements to the otherwise. efficiency is more dependant on
circuit topology to the point that is is unreasonable to be non-linear.

Power amplifier are pretty much all non-linear, except for classic
single-sideband or TV power amps. But even there tricks such as pulse
modulation had made some inroads. However, in this age of spread
spectrum comms and digital TV (if and when it really comes...) their
days may be numbered.

Just think about it: The big final power amp of an AM transmitter
usually has an efficiency well north of 80%. That wouldn't be possible
if this was a linear amp. These days it's basically a very fast switch
with it's supply voltage modulated via a PWM stage.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

 

[Daniel Mandic]

Radium wrote:

, I had a PC that used
laseronics [photonics using lasers and without any LEDs] in place of
electronics. If this laseronic computer uses "parallel-Hz" would it
run into something similar to "leakage current"? If so, what is the
optical equivalent of leakage current?


Thanx,

Radium

Ask an 'Cinema-Technic' expert


Here it is somehow wrong, beside USB, MIDI, Firewire and Wheel Mouse
Optical




Best regards,

Daniel Mandic

 

[Charlie Siegrist]

Circa Sun, 20 May 2007 10:01:20 +0200 recorded as
<464fff7a$0$13862$ba620e4c@news.skynet.be> looks like "M."
<m.horemans@skynet.be> sounds like:

Hi,
for a small elektronic projekt I need to convert 5Vdc to 22-24Vdc at 100mA
max.
It has to be done on PCB and the area needs to be as small as possible.
Are there any special IC's available for this?

Yes. Google "dc to dc converter." The requirement for 24V at 100mA might
be difficult to meet in a really small, or "subminiature" package.

 

[Paul E. Schoen]

"Charlie Siegrist" <chamarsie.spam@spam.cableone.net> wrote in message
news:5lt053lbshgdm3gdii0uctfgf0c280ajbt@4ax.com...

Circa Sun, 20 May 2007 10:01:20 +0200 recorded as
464fff7a$0$13862$ba620e4c@news.skynet.be> looks like "M."
m.horemans@skynet.be> sounds like:

Hi,
for a small elektronic projekt I need to convert 5Vdc to 22-24Vdc at
100mA
max.
It has to be done on PCB and the area needs to be as small as possible.
Are there any special IC's available for this?

Yes. Google "dc to dc converter." The requirement for 24V at 100mA
might
be difficult to meet in a really small, or "subminiature" package.

I did something like this with a PIC16F684 which drives a MOSFET with 100
kHz PWM in a boost converter using a 10 uH choke. The entire board is 1" x
2", and it converts 12 VDC to a current of up to 750 mA at 22 to 50 VDC. I
simulated it with LTSpice, and posted the ASCII file on S.E.D. You can also
find single chip solutions, and good app notes and switcher tutorials, on
the website www.linear.com. I learned a lot by designing it with a PIC.

Paul

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

Antoll MA wrote:

June 6, World Contact with aliens
http://www.antollma.info/spip.php?rubrique190

6 Juin, Contact Mondial avec les Extraterrestres
http://www.antollma.info/spip.php?rubrique188

6 Giugno , Contatti Mondiali con gli Extraterrestri
http://www.antollma.info/spip.php?rubrique192

6 Juni, Weltweiter Kontakt mit den außerirdischen
http://www.antollma.info/spip.php?rubrique189

6 de Junio, Contacto Mundial con los Extraterrestres
http://www.antollma.info/spip.php?rubrique191

Bullshit! They were here last week.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[Doug Miller]

In article <4650DE23.721BB391@earthlink.net>, mike.terrell@earthlink.net wrote:

Antoll MA wrote:

June 6, World Contact with aliens
http://www.antollma.info/spip.php?rubrique190

Bullshit! They were here last week.

And I missed it!

Lucky thing they're coming back so soon.

--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

It's time to throw all their damned tea in the harbor again.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

Doug Miller wrote:

In article <4650DE23.721BB391@earthlink.net>, mike.terrell@earthlink.net wrote:
Antoll MA wrote:

June 6, World Contact with aliens
http://www.antollma.info/spip.php?rubrique190

Bullshit! They were here last week.

And I missed it!

Lucky thing they're coming back so soon.

That bunch is just a shipload of bad Elvis impersonators. You can see
them in Vegas any time.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[Allan C Cybulskie]

On Apr 21, 9:04 am, stevendaryl3...@yahoo.com (Daryl McCullough)
wrote:

Allan C Cybulskie says...





On Apr 15, 10:55 am, stevendaryl3...@yahoo.com (Daryl McCullough)
wrote:
Allan C Cybulskie says...
And you've ignored my other comments on this: basically, that calling
911 is ALSO a fire alarm by that definition, as well as the fire
department getting a "feeling" and going there, and any number of
other things that could make the fire department show up there.

Yes, that's true. The functional roles of all those cases
are slightly different, but they fall in the same broad
category of "alarm".

But then do you think that there's no interesting differences between
all of those types of alarms, and so that the final result isn't the
only interesting thing in the definition?

I didn't say that or imply that. What I said was that to be a fire
alarm is a functional role. Do you disagree with that?

I think this answer is sliding the discussion a bit. I mean, look,
the things are different. No question. Now what you want to do is
talk about them as all being "fire alarms" based on a functional
role. Now, looking at the above examples there's one SPECIFIC
functional role -- summoning the fire department -- that they all
manage. But there are different functional roles as well (calling 911
won't warn anyone ELSE, for example, that the building is on fire).
And we all agree, of course, that there are differences in HOW the
functional role is achieved.

Now, it isn't really a problem that you consider the important thing
about fire alarms to be the functionality of summoning the fire
department. But if you want to say that that's just what it MEANS to
be a fire alarm, you can only do so if that's GENERALLY ACCEPTED as
the way to define "fire alarm". And that won't work, since for most
of us calling 911 isn't a fire alarm because it doesn't warn anyone
else. And this doesn't even get into the differences of
implementation that might be important (for example, can I call 911 if
my phone is broken?) in some cases.

The same thing applies to the consciousness debate. It's okay for you
to say "I only care about the functional role", but when you try to
claim that that's all it means to be conscious you run into people
pointing out that phenomenal experience seems to be left out, since I
know that _I_ can act in certain ways without phenomenal experience of
the relevant factors, and can have phenomenal experiences without
acting on them. And so the discussion's going to have to be over what
definition SHOULD be used, but note that your characterisation leaves
out qualities that MAY BE IMPORTANT to other people, even if you don't
care about them.

I don't believe that makes any sense. I don't think that
"phenomenal experience" means anything other than the functional
role.

Yes, but what you "believe" doesn't amount to a hill of beans. When
people talk about phenomenal experience, that isn't what they mean.

I should say that "phenomenal experience" *is* a certain
functional role, whether people realize it or not.

But that flies PRECISELY in the face of all the evidence: I can have
phenomenal experiences that don't in fact play a role in any current
or even later behaviour. So what kind of "functional role" could it
be?

If you can come up with a good description of a functional role for
phenomenal experience that is compatible with how phenomenal
experiences work, I'm all ears. But until then your argument strikes
me as arguing that what it means to be a red traffic light is just
that cars stop at it. However, the key is that it is a light that is
red on a traffic post at an intersection; the functional role is co-
opted from those qualities with an additional social interpretation.

Scientific explanation is about explaining
*causal relationships* between things. The
things themselves are not really accessible
to science, just the relationships.

Now, one issue here is this: if the behavioural zombie is possible,

...And I don't believe it is.

Except that it IS possible: take any actor.

Behavioural zombies -- things that act like they are in pain when they
don't feel pain -- are absolutely certain and proven to be possible.
Physical zombies -- where they are behavioural zombies that are ALSO
physically identical to non-zombies -- don't seem possible.

that 1-1 mapping you talk about isn't possible for phenomenal
experiences;

Sure it is. The zombie has a state that is isomorphic to
being in pain --- it's caused by the same things that cause
pain, and it has the same effect on the zombie that pain
has on us.

But does it have the experience or not? That's the question with the
behavioural zombie, and if it can happen that the zombie acts without
feeling, then the mapping isn't possible.

something that doesn't have those experiences may indeed
act in the same way, so you haven't shown, for example, that those
experiences are there when that action occurs, nor how I can tell if
they ARE there in those situations.

If the zombie winces or cries or screams when you hit his toe,
you know that hitting his toe has made a state change to whatever
controls the zombie's behavior. You can investigate what that state
change is. It is in a 1-1 correspondence with "experiencing a pain".

But is it, itself, "experiencing a pain"?

I fail to see why you think this matters to the debate. It is
analogical to saying that because I can buy seat covers for a car that
is red on the basis that someone told me that it was red that I must
have SEEN the car as being red in order to do that. But that's
ridiculous; I can take actions simply on the basis of what I was told,
not having to have in any interesting way SEEN the car.

To put it into the fire alarm example, to explain what it means to be
an actual pulled fire alarm versus a 911 call critically involves
explaining how I can tell which is the case in any particular
scenario. You aren't doing that for phenomenal experiences.

Pulling the lever versus making a 911 call have slightly different
functional roles. They result in slightly different responses. The
zombie is, by assumption, making *identical* responses to humans.
So the analogy would be something that *looks* exactly like a
fire alarm, and causes exactly the same responses as a fire
alarm, but *isn't* really a fire alarm.

Well, not with respect to the fire department arriving, which was your
original example. If we limit it to that, then they don't have
different functional roles. And note that there's an additional
correspondence argument here that you are smuggling in: If the zombie
ISN'T physically identical to a human -- for example, it's a robot --
then all we have is the functional role. Is that sufficient? It
doesn't seem like it based on the idea that you can act as if you are
having phenomenal experiences that you aren't having.

Crudely speaking, the pain is like a message board. Some neurons
notice something wrong with the body (your hand is on fire, or
a knife is sticking into your back) and posts a message to the
board (in not much detail). Other neurons are constantly checking
the board and responding to what they find there. The "phenomenal
experience of pain" I believe is just the way that the conscious
brain summarizes all this activity. When we reflect on "What's
going on inside me?" pain is the way we describe it.

Okay, and what is the message board? Is it a group of neurons?

Yes, something like that.

And why does that message board appear to me the way it does
-- with an experience of pain -- as opposed to something else?

What "something else" could it be? What are the details of
your particular experience of pain that need to be explained?

Well, why don't I "hear" pain? "See" music? Why don't we just get a
visual schematic appearing with where the pain is? Why don't we get a
statement saying "Damage to right arm" flashing before our eyes? Etc,
etc.

Okay, these are fairly facetious, but they make my point: if we
understood phenomenal experience, we'd at least have some idea of why
it feels the way it does. We don't.

My claim (which admittedly is not currently susceptible to experiment)
is that pain is just an internal message, it doesn't matter how
it is encoded, what matters is how the rest of the brain and the
body produces and acts on that information.

See, here's where the problem is coming in: it is quite possible to
accept that it is just an internal message, and that behaviourally it
doesn't matter how it is encoded, and yet still accept that how it is
encoded IN HUMANS is critically important to the concept of
"consciousness" ... that if the encoding ain't one that produces
experiences, it ain't a conscious encoding.

I've said elsewhere that for AI you probably don't need conscious
experiences at all. That means that I'll be VERY resistant to
defining what an AI can do as being "conscious" without good evidence.

As I suggested in
another post, imagine that we identify what exact neurochemical
reaction in which localized part of the brain corresponds to
"tasting sweetness" and we similarly identify what is the
neural correlate of "feeling pain". Now imagine that a clever
and diabolical brain surgeon rewires a person's brain so that
all the causal relations involving pain are replaced by
tasting sweetness. So now, stepping on somebody's toe causes
the person to taste sweetness, but tasting sweetness (localized
in his toe) causes the person to jerk his toe away and cry out
and later have the same short-term and long-term memories
as if he had felt pain.

Would it be correct to say that this person is no longer
capable of feeling pain when you step on his toe? According
to the functional view, such a rewiring would make no difference.
The person still feels pain, because pain is the functional
role played by the brain state, and the functional role is
still present.

Yeah, but then the implication of this would be that there was no
change made. And by your own example, that isn't true.

 

[Allan C Cybulskie]

On Apr 21, 9:21 am, stevendaryl3...@yahoo.com (Daryl McCullough)
wrote:

Allan C Cybulskie says...

You miss the point. I have no privileged access to what it turns out
to be ... but I KNOW if I'm having it or not.

I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing whether that allows
you to generalize to other people, whether you know what
it means for someone *else* to feel pain.

And my answer has been consistent: no, I don't.

Since the behaviour produced by the feeling is more dubious than
that, you can view my behaviour but cannot validate if the
experience is really there are not. So it isn't just the behaviour;
if the privately accessible experience is not present, pain isn't
present.

But how do you know whether that is possible? What reason
do you have for believing that experience without accompanying
behavior is possible? I don't see how you could
Ipossibly
know that. I understand that you can feel pain and "keep
it to yourself" and not cry, not scream, not wince. But
do you really think that it is possible to *perfectly*
behave as if you were not in pain? Is it possible for
the pain to have no effect on your ability to concentrate,
your ability to do your job, your ability to have fun?
That doesn't seem at all plausible to me.

Hmmm. And these are mostly internal (except for ability to do your
job) and not available to you. Besides, it is in fact the case.
Think about MINOR pains, like the pinprick left over after a needle.
Can you be feeling that and be unimpaired? The answer seems to be
"Yes".

I mean, we have to NOTICE it internally for it to be pain, but that
doesn't mean that we can't go on functioning without any real
difference in function or behaviour. If you want to claim that we
have to NOTICE it, then your view doesn't seem to address in any way
what I'm going on about, since I'd simply say that noticing it is
experiencing it ... but that we could act on it as if we were
experiencing it when we aren't.

And that's the key point here: Not so much that we can dampen pain to
not act on it, but that we can duplicate the behaviour of pain without
feeling it. In your examples above, you could tell a story about how
the internal state is different in those cases, but that's exactly my
point: Pain is critically an internal phenomenon, meaning that a
computer could duplicate pain behaviour without having the internal
phenomena. We can agree, perhaps, that if a computer felt pain it
would act on that pain, but not that if the computer acts as if it is
in pain it MUST be in pain.

Or, to put it better: From the inside, I KNOW that I'm in pain; from
the outside, with you looking at the behaviour, you don't know that
I'm in pain.

Yes, but if I understood perfectly *all* aspects of your behavior
(and by "behavior" here, I mean not only what you are currently
doing, but also your abilities and predispositions to behave, etc.)
do you really think that it is possible for there to be no difference
between being in pain and not being in pain?

I don't know whether you are in pain because I only have a superficial
knowledge of your behavior.

You now need to list all the things you consider "behaviour", because
it looks like you are going to lump the experience into that, which
makes your claim uncontroversial.

 

[Glen M. Sizemore]

"Allan C Cybulskie" <allan_c_cybulskie@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:1179750563.940818.261950@z28g2000prd.googlegroups.com...

On Apr 21, 9:04 am, stevendaryl3...@yahoo.com (Daryl McCullough)
wrote:

I should say that "phenomenal experience" *is* a certain
functional role, whether people realize it or not.

But that flies PRECISELY in the face of all the evidence: I can have
phenomenal experiences that don't in fact play a role in any current
or even later behaviour. So what kind of "functional role" could it
be?

No, it doesn't. If the perception-is-behavior people are correct, then what
you say doesn't make sense. What DM said doesn't fly in the face of one
single piece of evidence. It flies in the face of your assumptions
concerning what is and is not behavior.

 

[Daryl McCullough]

Allan C Cybulskie says...

On Apr 21, 9:04 am, stevendaryl3...@yahoo.com (Daryl McCullough)
wrote:
Allan C Cybulskie says...

But then do you think that there's no interesting differences between
all of those types of alarms, and so that the final result isn't the
only interesting thing in the definition?

I didn't say that or imply that. What I said was that to be a fire
alarm is a functional role. Do you disagree with that?

I think this answer is sliding the discussion a bit.

Well, it is directly relevant to my point, which is that
many objects are defined functionally, in terms of the
role that they play. "Fire alarm" is one of them, and I
believe that "consciousness" is another. Yes, certainly
there can be differences among things that play the same
role.

The same thing applies to the consciousness debate. It's okay for you
to say "I only care about the functional role", but when you try to
claim that that's all it means to be conscious you run into people
pointing out that phenomenal experience seems to be left out, since I
know that _I_ can act in certain ways without phenomenal experience of
the relevant factors, and can have phenomenal experiences without
acting on them.

I don't think you know that at all. You believe that it is possible
to feel pain and yet that pain has *no* effect on your subsequent
behavior? I don't believe it.

I should say that "phenomenal experience" *is* a certain
functional role, whether people realize it or not.

But that flies PRECISELY in the face of all the evidence: I can have
phenomenal experiences that don't in fact play a role in any current
or even later behaviour.

I don't believe you. Or rather, I believe that you are wrong about that.

Now, one issue here is this: if the behavioural zombie is possible,

...And I don't believe it is.

Except that it IS possible: take any actor.

An actor is not a zombie.

Behavioural zombies -- things that act like they are in pain when they
don't feel pain -- are absolutely certain and proven to be possible.

I don't believe that. I think that's false. The only way that we
ever come to the conclusion that someone is not in pain is through
observing them: They don't behave as if they are in pain. There is
no other route to knowledge about someone else's pain.

We know that an actor is just acting because his behavior is *different*
from a person that is really in pain. When the director calls for a
break, the actor *stops* acting as if he is in pain. When the actor
goes home at the end of the day, he stops limping or wincing or whatever.
The actor doesn't take pain killers. He doesn't go to the doctor. There
is a purely behavioral difference between an actor's pain and the pain
of a nonactor.

So the possibility of acting does not imply that pain is not functional.

that 1-1 mapping you talk about isn't possible for phenomenal
experiences;

Sure it is. The zombie has a state that is isomorphic to
being in pain --- it's caused by the same things that cause
pain, and it has the same effect on the zombie that pain
has on us.

But does it have the experience or not?

Yes, because phenomenal experience is simply a state with certain
causal relations.

That's the question with the behavioural zombie, and if it can happen
that the zombie acts without feeling, then the mapping isn't possible.

If the zombie is functionally equivalent to a human, then the mapping
*is* possible. "Functionally equivalent" means the same thing as
"there is a mapping that preserves causal relationships".

If the zombie winces or cries or screams when you hit his toe,
you know that hitting his toe has made a state change to whatever
controls the zombie's behavior. You can investigate what that state
change is. It is in a 1-1 correspondence with "experiencing a pain".

But is it, itself, "experiencing a pain"?

To the extent that that expression has any meaning whatsoever,
yes. Of course, you can limit the meaning of "experience" so
that it only applies to your own inner states. In that case, you
don't need a word for it. Words are for communication with others.
You don't need words to talk to yourself about things that are only
meaningful to you.

Pulling the lever versus making a 911 call have slightly different
functional roles. They result in slightly different responses. The
zombie is, by assumption, making *identical* responses to humans.
So the analogy would be something that *looks* exactly like a
fire alarm, and causes exactly the same responses as a fire
alarm, but *isn't* really a fire alarm.

Well, not with respect to the fire department arriving, which was your
original example. If we limit it to that, then they don't have
different functional roles. And note that there's an additional
correspondence argument here that you are smuggling in: If the zombie
ISN'T physically identical to a human -- for example, it's a robot --
then all we have is the functional role. Is that sufficient?

Yes. It's sufficient for humans, and it's sufficient for robots.

It doesn't seem like it based on the idea that you can act as
if you are having phenomenal experiences that you aren't having.

I don't agree with that idea.

And why does that message board appear to me the way it does
-- with an experience of pain -- as opposed to something else?

What "something else" could it be? What are the details of
your particular experience of pain that need to be explained?

Well, why don't I "hear" pain?

What would that even mean?

"See" music?

What would that even mean?

Why don't we just get a visual schematic appearing with where the pain
is?

That's a good question, but I think it is adequately answered by
evolution. Pain evolved first in animals that were much too primitive
to be able to read visual schematics.

Why don't we get a statement saying "Damage to right arm" flashing
before our eyes? Etc, etc.

Once again, pain evolved for primitive animals that certainly
can't read.

Okay, these are fairly facetious, but they make my point: if we
understood phenomenal experience, we'd at least have some idea of why
it feels the way it does. We don't.

I think most of those questions are non-questions. If you ask
"Why X rather than Y?", the question is only meaningful if you
have a clear notion of what it would *mean* for Y to be the
case, rather than X. If you don't have a clear idea, then the
question is meaningless.

Now, it is possible that you could elaborate on the notion of
"hearing pain" so that it became a sensible thing to talk about.
But that elaboration would necessarily involve a *functional*
change in the way that we experience pain. For example, hearing
has many functional properties with no correspondence in feeling
pain. For example, sounds come in pitch and loudness. There is also
discrepancy between sounds heard in the left ear and sounds heard
in the right ear.

You could imagine feeling pain in that way, so that pains come
in pitch and loudness and comes in stereo. But that would be a
functionally different way to feel pain.

My claim (which admittedly is not currently susceptible to experiment)
is that pain is just an internal message, it doesn't matter how
it is encoded, what matters is how the rest of the brain and the
body produces and acts on that information.

See, here's where the problem is coming in: it is quite possible to
accept that it is just an internal message, and that behaviourally it
doesn't matter how it is encoded, and yet still accept that how it is
encoded IN HUMANS is critically important to the concept of
"consciousness" ... that if the encoding ain't one that produces
experiences, it ain't a conscious encoding.

How could it be important? We don't have access to the encoding.
We make the judgement that others are in pain *without* knowing
anything at all about encodings.

I've said elsewhere that for AI you probably don't need conscious
experiences at all.

And I say that makes no sense whatsoever.

That means that I'll be VERY resistant to defining what an AI can
do as being "conscious" without good evidence.

The way you interpret the word "consciousness", it only applies
to you, personally. So why don't we just call that ACC-consciousness,
and you can just use that word when talking to yourself. For others,
the important concept is a notion of consciousness that applies to
*more* than one entity. The criterion for applicability must be
something other than introspection.

As I suggested in
another post, imagine that we identify what exact neurochemical
reaction in which localized part of the brain corresponds to
"tasting sweetness" and we similarly identify what is the
neural correlate of "feeling pain". Now imagine that a clever
and diabolical brain surgeon rewires a person's brain so that
all the causal relations involving pain are replaced by
tasting sweetness. So now, stepping on somebody's toe causes
the person to taste sweetness, but tasting sweetness (localized
in his toe) causes the person to jerk his toe away and cry out
and later have the same short-term and long-term memories
as if he had felt pain.

Would it be correct to say that this person is no longer
capable of feeling pain when you step on his toe? According
to the functional view, such a rewiring would make no difference.
The person still feels pain, because pain is the functional
role played by the brain state, and the functional role is
still present.

Yeah, but then the implication of this would be that there was no
change made. And by your own example, that isn't true.

The example was supposed to show the absurdity of a nonfunctional
view of pain. If pain were nonfunctional, then it should be possible
to rewire a human so that he was incapable of feeling pain, yet
he would continue to *act* as if he felt pain when you step on his
toe. That possibility is absurd, in my opinion. So the idea of
nonfunctional pain is absurd.

Do you believe it is possible that some future medical advance could
eliminate pain without modifying any of the behavioral *symptoms* of
pain? If not, why not?

--
Daryl McCullough
Ithaca, NY

 

[Daryl McCullough]

Allan C Cybulskie says...

On Apr 21, 9:21 am, stevendaryl3...@yahoo.com (Daryl McCullough)
wrote:
Allan C Cybulskie says...

You miss the point. I have no privileged access to what it turns out
to be ... but I KNOW if I'm having it or not.

I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing whether that allows
you to generalize to other people, whether you know what
it means for someone *else* to feel pain.

And my answer has been consistent: no, I don't.

Then it follows that your notion of "pain" doesn't apply to
discussions with other people. Because obviously when I talk
about pain, I'm not talking about *your* pain. If you can't
generalize, then you really can't talk about pain with someone
else. You can continue to talk to yourself about it, of course...

But how do you know whether that is possible? What reason
do you have for believing that experience without accompanying
behavior is possible? I don't see how you could
Ipossibly
know that. I understand that you can feel pain and "keep
it to yourself" and not cry, not scream, not wince. But
do you really think that it is possible to *perfectly*
behave as if you were not in pain? Is it possible for
the pain to have no effect on your ability to concentrate,
your ability to do your job, your ability to have fun?
That doesn't seem at all plausible to me.

Hmmm. And these are mostly internal (except for ability to do your
job) and not available to you.

I certainly believe in the existence of internal states. But
I believe that the states of interest are defined *functionally*
in terms of their causal relations.

Besides, it is in fact the case. Think about MINOR pains, like the
pinprick left over after a needle. Can you be feeling that and be
unimpaired? The answer seems to be "Yes".

I think even minor pains affect behavior. At the least, you wince,
you say "ouch", you jerk your arm.

I mean, we have to NOTICE it internally for it to be pain, but that
doesn't mean that we can't go on functioning without any real
difference in function or behaviour.

If you notice something, then it has a potential affect on
your behavior.

And that's the key point here: Not so much that we can dampen pain to
not act on it, but that we can duplicate the behaviour of pain without
feeling it.

Once again, imagine that a surgeon develops a surgical procedure
that completely eliminates pain. However, all behavioral symptoms
of pain are left unchanged. The person still cries out when you
step on his toe. The person still *claims* to be in pain.
Do you think that such a procedure is conceptually
possible? I don't. I don't think it makes a bit of sense.

In your examples above, you could tell a story about how
the internal state is different in those cases, but that's exactly my
point: Pain is critically an internal phenomenon, meaning that a
computer could duplicate pain behaviour without having the internal
phenomena.

I agree that pain is an internal phenomenon, but I believe that
it is simply a state with a certain functional description. For
a computer to be able to consistently behave as if it were in
pain, it would have to *implement* such a state and there would
have to be the correct causal relationships between the state,
external stimuli that cause the state, and future behavior.

I understand your intuition about someone "faking" being in pain.
But the only way that we understand what it means to "fake" pain
is if the person abandons the pretense when he thinks nobody is
looking. It's fake because it is *different* from real pain in
terms of its causes and its behavior.

Yes, but if I understood perfectly *all* aspects of your behavior
(and by "behavior" here, I mean not only what you are currently
doing, but also your abilities and predispositions to behave, etc.)
do you really think that it is possible for there to be no difference
between being in pain and not being in pain?

I don't know whether you are in pain because I only have a superficial
knowledge of your behavior.

You now need to list all the things you consider "behaviour", because
it looks like you are going to lump the experience into that, which
makes your claim uncontroversial.

Good. I'm not trying to be controversial.

--
Daryl McCullough
Ithaca, NY

 

[J.A. Legris]

On May 21, 10:23 am, stevendaryl3...@yahoo.com (Daryl McCullough)
wrote:

The example was supposed to show the absurdity of a nonfunctional
view of pain. If pain were nonfunctional, then it should be possible
to rewire a human so that he was incapable of feeling pain, yet
he would continue to *act* as if he felt pain when you step on his
toe. That possibility is absurd, in my opinion. So the idea of
nonfunctional pain is absurd.

Do you believe it is possible that some future medical advance could
eliminate pain without modifying any of the behavioral *symptoms* of
pain? If not, why not?

How about pain that is felt and recognizable as such, but which fails
to induce the ordinary responses of escape and misery? This is what
happens when morphine and other opiates are given and it is readily
distinguished from the analgesia induced by local anesthetics, where
the both the pain and its effects are gone. I used to think all pain
relief was the same, and when they gave me morphine for an extremely
painful dislocated elbow it still hurt like hell, but it just didn't
seem to matter any more. What's more, pain is an effective antidote
for an overdose of opiates.

--
Joe