On Thu, May 25, 2023 at 7:28 AM Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
*> Have you ever wondered what delineates the mind from its environment?* > No. > * > Why it is that you are not aware of my thoughts but you see me as an > object that only affects your senses, even though we could represent the > whole earth as one big functional system?* > The reason is lack of information and lack of computational resources, it's the same reason you're not aware of the velocity of every molecule of the air in the room you're in right now nor can you predict what all the molecules will be doing one hour from now, but you are aware of the air's temperature now and you can make a pretty good guess about what the temperature will be in one hour. > *> I don't have a good answer to this question* > Then how fortunate it is for you to be able to talk to me. *> The randomly generated outputs from the RNG would seem an environmental > noise/sensation coming from the outside, rather than a recursively linked > and connected loop of processing * In your ridiculous example the cause of the neuron acting the way it does is not coming from the inside and it does not come from the outside either because you claim the neuron is acting randomly and the very definition of "random" is an event without a cause. > *But here (almost by magic), the RNG outputs have forced the physical > behavior of the remaining hemisphere to remain the same* > That is incorrect. The neuron is not behaving "*ALMOST*" magically, it *IS *magical; but you were the one who dreamed up this magical thought experiment, not me. *Arnold Zuboff has written a thought experiment to this effect.* > I'm not going to bother looking it up because you and I have very different ideas about what constitutes a good thought experiment. *> But if a theory cannot acknowledge a difference in the conscious between > an electron and a dreaming brain inside a skull, then the theory is (in my > opinion) operationally useless.* > Correct. Unless you make the unprovable assumption that intelligent behavior implies consciousness then EVERY consciousness theory is operationally useless. And useless for the study of Ontology and Epistemology too. In other words just plain useless. That's why I'm vastly more interested in intelligence theories than consciousness theories; one is easy to fake and the other is impossible to fake. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> tic -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0UZTyZ67zO%2Bjj2cmoyLbCyxDpMTEpj7yJipHiWdNdJUg%40mail.gmail.com.
