I'm not talking about acutal ping pong balls, I'm talking about ideal ping pong balls which are not made of any subordinate units. Just white spheres which serve as placeholders for atoms, digital vectors, whatever. Just the principle of basic things having only physical qualities to demonstrate how it doesn't follow that arrangement in and of itself can cause anything live or feel.
Instead, I propose that real atoms have real properties which we cannot observe unless they are in a complex arrangement which is similar enough to our own that we can relate to it as a whole. All stuff is special, but the quality that makes it special is the ability to feel more and more special through combining in groups, meta groups, meta meta groups, etc. Externally, it's expressed over space as increasingly elaborate nested groupings or inertial frames of objects and movements governed by electomagnetic relativity, but internally it's expressed as a coherence of sensorimotive perceptual frames. Instead of more equaling literally more cells or synapses, more equals better, greater, richer. Not merely larger, faster, denser, closer, but more important, more powerful, more satisfying. To say that something is conscious just means that it 'acts like us'. The less we can relate to any particular thing, the more we fail to perceive it as employing awareness. Instead we see it as automatic 'nature', probability, etc. That's just what it looks like from the outside, out of focus as it were, on different scales and in non-human contexts. The universe is all one thing but it's a zillion different private interior universes also depending on what you are, how you participate in it. >Primary colors aren't even a mental construct. They're a language >choice. Orange is new primary color (according to you), as is cyan and >magenta and brown and white and black. Some languages have dozens of >colors some have only a few. Which are called "primary" is purely a >language convention. I'm not talking about the idea of a primary color as linguistic distinction, I'm talking about the inability of a color to be reduced to combinations of other colors. Red, Green, and Blue are the primary hues of projected light, Red, Yellow, and Blue are the primary hues of reflected light. Cultures may not distinguish green from blue as far as referring to it by name, but they can see that green and green plus cannot be made by combining any other colors if it were demonstrated to them. On Jul 11, 5:33 pm, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 7/10/2011 6:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > I do think that we can say, with the same certainty that we cannot > > create a square circle, that it would not be possible at any level of > > complexity. It's not that they can't create novelty or surprise, it's > > that they can't feel or care about their own survival. I'm saying that > > the potential for awareness must be built in to matter at the lowest > > level or not at all. > > At the lowest level ping pong balls and brains are mde of the same stuff > (quarks, electrons, photons,....). So the potential for awareness is > built in to quarks, electrons, photons, etc. Your position seems > incoherent. You're saying brains are made of special stuff that can be > conscious. But on the other hand you say that if any stuff is special > all stuff must be special (which kind of robs "special" of its usual > meaning). But then you say that even if all stuff is special you can't > make a conscious brain out of just any stuff, you have to make it out of > special stuff. ??? > > Brent -- 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.
