On Apr 27, 12:23 pm, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > > So you have indeed the necessity to abandon comp to maintain your form > of immaterialist platonism, but then you lose the tool for questioning > nature. It almost look like choosing a theory because it does not even > address the question ?
Okay, going back to basics. It seems to me that there are two questions: A) The problem of explaining WHAT we perceive B) The problem of explaining THAT we perceive The first issue is addressed by the third-person process of physics, and of just generally trying make sense of what we perceive as we go through the daily grind of life. Everybody has a grasp of this issue, because you're faced with it everyday as soon as you wake up in the morning, "what's going on here???". The second issue is obviously the more subtle first-person problem of consciousness. But, for A, the fact that we are able to come up with rational-seeming explanations for what we experience, and that there seems to us to be an orderly pattern to what we perceive, doesn't answer the deeper question of the ultimate nature of this external world that we are observing. Here we get into issues of scientific/structural realism. In other words, what do our scientific theories really mean? (http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/) But I don't think we can assign any real meaning to what we observe until we have an acceptable understanding of the first person subjective experience by which we make our observations. So the question of consciousness is more fundamental than the questions of physics. We can come up with scientific theories to explain our observations, but since we don't know what an observation really is, this can only get us so far in really understanding what's going on with reality. Until we have a foundation in place, everything built above is speculative. To rely on physics as your foundation is "with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness." But here we hit a problem because the process that we use to explain objective data doesn't work when applied to subjective experience. There is a discontinuity. The third-person perceived reality vs. first-person experienced reality. The latter apparently can't be explained in terms of the former. But without an explanation for the latter, I don't see how any meaning can be attached to the former. And I think that is for this reason that I don't get hung up on the "white rabbit" problem. Arguments based on the probability of finding yourself in this state or that state are fine if all other things are equal, and that's the only information you have to reason with. But I don't think that we're in that situation. So I start with the assumption of physicalism and then say that based on that assumption, a computer simulation should be conscious, and then from there I find reasons to think that consciousness doesn't depend on physicalism. To me, the most likely alternate explanation seems to be that consciousness depends on information. However, I am relying on some of my thought experiments that assumed physicalism as support for my conclusion of "informationalism". But I think the discontinuity between first and third person experience is another important clue, because I think that this break will be noticeable to all rational conscious entities in all possible worlds (even chaotic, irrational worlds). They should all notice a difference in kind between what is observed (no matter how crazy it is), and the subjective experience of making the observation. Further, let's say that I am a rational observer in a world where changes to brain structure do not appear to cause changes to behavior or subjective experience. Physicalism wouldn't have much appeal in this world. Rather, dualism would seem to have a clear edge as the default explanation. But it might be even easier to make the leap to platonism in such a world, as presumably Plato's "ideal forms" might be even more appealing. So in such a world you wouldn't get to platonism by way of thinking about computer simulations of brains (since brain activity isn't correlated with behavior), but I think you would still get there. The question is, what kind of world NOT lead you to Platonism? I think only a world that didn't have first person experience. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
