>> that doesn't need any >> complex logic behind it, > >Why? This is just like saying "we can't explain it". I am OK with >that, but then I look for better definitions and assumptions, with the >goal of at least finding an explanation of why it seems like that, or >why there is no explanation. Without this, it is like invoking the >will of God, and adding "don't search for an explanation".
Right, I totally agree. I just think there's a significant chance that we will be looking in the wrong place if we restrict ourselves to digital-analytic logic. Not saying that we should abandon all hope of producing insights from that area too, I'm just wanting to know if anyone has any objections to me planting a flag on this new continent to explore. My thinking at this point is that why it seems so difficult to explain is that : 1) since we, the subjective observer is in my opinion a phenomena of a category which is identical to qualia, the sameness leads to an ontological problem of not being able to examine qualia from outside of the realm of qualia. 2) the nature of qualitative phenomenon itself is the opposite (interior, perhaps trans-terior) of quantitative phenomenology so we may have to control our scientific impulses toward deterministic theory to allow for more flexible and intuitive apprehensions to embrace the nuances of how it works. 3) the qualitative principle is identical to privacy in an ontological sense of being self-sequestering from public exterior access. The privacy itself is what defines the locus of qualitative phenomena. 4) this 'stuff' may be ultimately originating through non-local, a- temporal axiom of the Singularity, so that we may not only have restricted access by virtue of our own separation from each other, but qualia itself may somehow present the experience of entities which we would consider to be in the future as well as the past. As far as 3 goes, we may actually be able to overcome our separateness using technology. To be able to experiment with a neural prosthetic which could extend our visual cortex to access multiple visual systems - insect, bird, dog, etc.. To be able to record and play back neural activity records.. These things are entirely possible and I think would be hugely informative. Maybe we can break some qualia codes that way, tweak our sensation retroperceptually, etc. 1 and 2 are just a matter of breaking habits of how we think about these things. That's the fun part. Next time you turn on the light in your room, look at what it is that you see, not as a flood of invisible photon stuff, but as eavesdropping on your eyeball's conversation with the illuminated surfaces of the room. The light isn't being added to your face or the room, it's all lighting itself up according to the perceptual-relativistic protocols of illumination. The surface of everything is lit up from the inside, or the trans- terior side in the presence of a sufficiently excited quantity of matter. It works just like a painting or computer graphic, in the sense that it is the surface itself which is changing and not some intangible light juice spraying all over the place. >> Pain cannot >> be simulated quantitatively in any way. > >How do you know? I don't, but I think if it could, then you would be asking my theory directly how it knows instead of me. >You remind me of the Spanish christians arguing that south american >indians have no souls. You can rape and enslave them at will: it is >not a sin! (To be sure they *did* eventually conclude, at the >Valladolid meeting, that they have a soul, so that it was necessary to >convert them to save them from hell). >(That's why the "spirit" of the Salvia divinorum plant became known as >the Virgin Mary!) That's the tragic irony. Turned out that they themselves were the ones who had no souls. Oops. I'm only taking a hard line on this because I think that it's in such contradistinction to the momentum of civilized thought. A sufficiently evolved card game could be pretty damn impressive, and if we invest our own feeling into it, there is arguably new feelings that we experience as a result, I just don't think that what we see as the game can have feelings that we can realize. We can't rule out though that anything we experience as having no feeling has a private dimension that may see us as having no feeling. It just gets a bit too psychedelic (salviadelic?) to actually implement that level of animism practically, don't you think? >I am OK with this. But I do think plausible that you can emulate >digitally first hand experiences of pain and pleasure. Then 'real' >human-like pain, which can last for a time, will need the whole >(arithmetical) truth to be stable on its many 'futures'. I think you can emulate first and experiences only in a system capable of subjectively experiencing them. We certainly should be able emulate the output of some kind of pain or pleasure and input it into another nervous system. Simple record and playback through an analog or digital medium. That's really one of my earliest and strongest dreams would be to be involved in the orchestration of full sensory experiences, brain-direct. >Our first >person experiences are non computably distributed on an infinite >structure, but that is a consequence of its digitalness at some level. There was a lot made of the perceived difference in digital music when CDs first came out, in the audiophile communities particularly. I do think that a subtle difference can be detected but hard to know whether it's the digital nature itself or the processing, mixing, playback equipment, confirmation bias, etc. Digital music seems harsher, more sibilant and shallow on the percussion. It doesn't bother me much, but I think there could be a legitimate, if subtle difference stemming from the pure conversion of analog waveforms to digital samples. Craig http://s33light.org On Jul 21, 10:03 am, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > On 21 Jul 2011, at 13:02, Craig Weinberg wrote: -- 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]. 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