On 27 Nov 2010, at 20:08, 1Z wrote:
On Nov 27, 6:49 pm, Rex Allen <[email protected]> wrote:
Given that there are an infinite number of ways that your information
could be represented, how likely is it that your experience really is
caused by a biological brain? Or even by a representation of a
biological brain?
Occam's razor: BIV, matrix and other sceptical scenarios are
always more complex, and therefore less likely than
"things are the way they seem to be"
That is what explains the success of Aristotelianism. But we can
easily understand how evolution programmed us to believe this. The
rise of Platonism, and the birth of science and theology was a
departure from the idea that "reality is what we see".
Now my point is that if we assume mechanism, then we do have an
explanation of why and how couplings "consciousness/realities" emerge
from elementary arithmetic, and it seems to me that elementary
arithmetic is conceptually simpler than any proposed theory so far.
The main point is that elementary arithmetic, seen as the theory of
'everything-including-consciousness', is testable (and up to now
confirmed).
I can understand that the idea that we are in a matrix is not pleasing
for some people, but science has to avoid as much as possible any form
of wishful thinking. And I am not pretending this is true, only that
it follows from the idea that the brain, or whatever my consciousness
supervenes on, is Turing emulable. To avoid this you have to introduce
big infinities in the picture, or, like Jacques Mallah, mysterious
physical roles, in a computation, to objects having no physical
activity in that computation.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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