On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 1:05 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > On 24 Jun 2011, at 17:49, Rex Allen wrote: >> >> Awareness and self-awareness aren't related to the question of >> consciousness. They fall well within the realm of the easy problems. > > I have deduced this from some posts. You, and Dennett are begging the > question.
I don't follow you. To which question are you referring? > Why should science be based only on observation? What would that > mean? It means that the primary goal of science is to allow the prediction of future observations in as convenient and useful a way as possible. If science didn't do this, there would be no point in messing with it. The core requirement for a scientific theory is that it must be consistent with what we have observed in the past, what we currently observe in the present, and what we will observe in the future. Thus, science is based on observation. However - coming up with stories that are consistent with observation but which aren't useful for prediction isn't science, though it might count as entertainment or religion. > Science, and already observation itself, are based on many layers of > theories, some innate in our brain, some developed through symbolic > reasoning, reflexion and imagination. The computationalist theory > illustrates well that we *can* explain the third person description of the > first person discourses. So we can make progress. That computational theory allows us to build third person models of first person discourses is neither here nor there with respect to it's metaphysical significance. > To abandon the scientific study of consciousness is like to abandon the > notion of God to the authorities. As I said: it is a form of "shut up and > calculate". Instrumentalism is about like abandoning the fundamental > questions to the engineering science. Many engineers do understand that it > will lead in less genuine engineering in the long run, so that eventually, > even instrumentalists with long term goal can defend a non-instrumentalist > philosophy here and now. That less engineering would result is an interesting supposition, but I doubt that it's true. This is identical to Christians saying that we need the idea of heaven and hell in order to keep people in line. "We need to believe that our theories are approaching some metaphysically truth, otherwise people will stop trying to improve them!" Possible, but unlikely. The practical benefits of more accurate and useful theories should be more than sufficient to keep people motivated. > And then, if we assume like Dennett the comp hypothesis, we have just no > choice than to recover the physical relations by the number relations > (unless there is a flaw ...). Even an instrumentalist cannot ignore that. > Comp, among other possible everything-like idea, leads to a real concrete > and terribly complex mathematical measure problem. Which is? > Consciousness is not like life. We can say that molecular biology has solved > the conceptual problem of life, and this has evacuate vitalism. But comp, > per se, does not solve the consciousness problem: it transforms it into a > conceptual matter problem, which can be solved only by evacuating > materialism, by reducing the origin of matter to a machine psychological > self-perception problem. You're assuming that there is some explanation for consciousness which exists beyond consciousness. But this isn't warranted. Conscious experience is a fact. That I can extrapolate from past observations to predict future observations using calculational frameworks is a fact. But there are no further facts beyond this, and none are needed. What's real is the world of experience. Everything else is (sometimes useful) fiction. > The reduction of the mind-body problem into the arithmetical bodies > appearance problem *has* been done. The fact that minds and bodies can be represented arithmetically doesn't mean that they *are* arithmetic in nature. The fact that minds and bodies can be so represented just tells us about the representational power of arithmetic...which is to say, the representational power of the human mind, which is what arithmetic reduces to. Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
