Mappism: formalizing classical and artificial life views on mind and consciousness

Abstract

Throughout centuries philosophers have attempted to understand the disparity between the conscious experience and the material world -i.e., the problem of consciousness and the apparent mind-body dualism. Achievements in the fields of biology, neurology, and information science in the last century granted us more insight into processes that govern our minds. While there are still many mysteries to be solved when it comes to fully understanding the inner workings of our brains, new discoveries suggest stepping away from the metaphysical philosophy of mind, and closer to the computational viewpoint. In light of the advent of strong artificial intelligence and the development of increasingly complex artificial life models and simulations, we need a well-defined, formal theory of consciousness. In order to facilitate this, in this work we introduce mappism. Mappism is a framework in which alternative views on consciousness can be formally expressed in a uniform way, thus allowing one to analyze and compare existing theories, and enforcing the use of the language of mathematics, i.e, explicit functions and variables. Using this framework, we describe classical and artificial life approaches to consciousness.

Etyka Spinozy sposobem informatycznym udowodniona – szkice z filozofii in silico.

“…symulacje różnych teorii bytu). Podejmowane są pierwsze próby wizualizacji filozoficznych twierdzeń (Jernajczyk 2016a(Jernajczyk , 2016b, jak również bardziej formalno-informatyczne symulacje (Błądek, Komosinski, Miazga 2019).…”

Universes and simulations: Civilizational development in nested embedding

“…• Universal and general measures of properties of life, intelligence, and consciousness, when such measures become available ( [70]; [36,Sect. 3]; [37,77,21,8]).…”

“…If the underlying substrates do not matter (i.e., it is not possible to distinguish a CA implemented in software, in electronic hardware or in some mechanical system, because their states are described in the same language and look identical) and there are no detectable differences in the transition function itself, then it would not be possible. Asking such a question is however closely related to the notions of perception and consciousness, and these aspects of embedded universes have been discussed in a separate article [8].…”