On Jul 29, 3:51 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: >That made it non Turing emulable. So you postulate the negation of comp. >You could at least be agnostic. >By postulating non-comp you refer to something unfathomable as a >primitive element in your theory, without showing how it put light on >the mind body problem.
Let me say this now and then I'll come back and respond to the Q&A later on... Here are some of the propositions of my SEE hypothesis: 1. Involuted continuum of universal sense: That the mind/body problem is understood to be a manifestation at the scale of a human being of a principle of private/interior-public/exterior relations common to all phenomena in the cosmos. The appearance of the problem arises due to the private nature of subjectivity, preventing it from being perceived in the public-exterior realm*. 2. Sensorimotive phenomenology: The interior of our own mind is familiar to us personally, as well as through psychology and neurology. What is missing is a concept which can unite these scientific and vernacular taxonomies. That concept is sensorimotive phenomenology. Recognized as a natural physiological division of labor within the nervous system, and characterizing afferent and efferent nerves by their apparent function to receive perception and transmit instructions electromagnetically to and from the body to the brain, SEE considers sensorimotor experiences are the interior correlates of electromagnetism in the nervous system and the elemental indivisibles of all human perception, experience, thought, meaning, language, etc. Note the use of the form sensorimotive is used intentionally as apart from sensorimotor, since motive experience is the engaged intention to act, and when that act is physically possible, only then are there consequences realized in the voluntary muscles of the body as motion or motor activity. Likewise sensory experience begins where physical activity leaves off, so that it is the interpretation of the world and the self that is sensorimotive rather than any activity which could be easily detected from the outside. 3. Extension and Limits of Sensorimotive phenomenolgy: Since the private* world of the subject is limited to the natural scope and scale of what the subject is, it is entirely probable that the cosmos we can examine around us is the tip of the iceberg, concealing a proprietary subcosmos within every atom, flea, planet, etc. It is difficult to guess how these worlds might coalesce and scale up, but the nature of sensorimotive phenomena is such that it extends through and beyond physically discrete forms, or be absent in forms we might be familiar with. A ceramic pot may have a sensorimotive integrity within the ceramic molecular matrix, but it may not have a sensorimitive dimension as a whole. It doesn't know it's a vase, it just knows about how it feels to be cemented together, to be wet, etc. Likewise a picture of Mickey Mouse doesn't have any Mickey Mouse experience going on. If you make a topiary of Mickey Mouse, you have only hedges experiencing normal hedge realities - sun, water, soil, and Edward Scissorhands over there, but no Mickey and no Mouse. If you have 10,000 people all wear different colored T-Shirts and stand in an arrangement to make an image of Mickey Mouse as seen from the air - those people have not taken on any qualities of any animated character themselves. They are aware only of human interactions, participating in a social event. 4. Simulation of sensorimotive phenomena. Like the Mickey Mouse or topiary, human beings have learned how to express their ideas, thoughts, and feelings through physical mediums accessible to the body. We articulate linguistic sense through the motor apparatus of our vocal chords and their associated efferent nerves. We paint, sculpt, clip hedges, choreograph dancers, direct films, etc to superimpose our private* teleology upon an exterior medium. Clay, ink and paper, masonry, civilization, etc. The critically important insight is that by using a cave to paint our bison upon, we are relating to the the pigment we drew with as a symbol/metaphor rather than the literal cave and mineral powder we use to paint it. We see our own experience now. Our friends can see and admire this icon and admire or hate it by their qualitative reaction to the semiotic piece. They could relate to the technique, the bison and it's associations, the shared memory of the hunt, their feelings about the artist, etc etc. What is not happening is that a bison is being created in a two dimensional form on a wall of a cave. For obvious reasons, a bison cannot be two dimensional and made of paint. Note that no other animal will likely be able to even recognize that the paint is in the shape of a bison, and that the cave and the paint is likely unaware of any of the goings on in the human world, however there may be both a geological and molecular sensorimotive experience - one that is much slower and faster than we can perceive as part of the the crust of the Earth, and the other much smaller and faster as interleaved molecular dynamics. 5. Application of the limits of sensorimotive phenomena to the question of artificial intelligence: My aim here is not to burst anyone's bubble regarding hope for technology, cybernetics, transhumanism, or the like. I do think that these things may be achievable but I no longer assume that they can be achieved in the way that most scientists are approaching it currently. Fans of Classical Digital mechanism (or Classical Computationalism, or just comp per Bruno) are absolutely justified in their enthusiasm for the flexibility of digital functionality to simulate human-like semiotic production to a great extent, and to surpass it in many areas. My objection to the strong form of comp, what I might call digital fundamentalism, is not rooted in any kind of sentimental defense of the sanctity of biology or anthropomorphic religiosity. I have no special desire to be constrained by the body's mortality or "the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to". I am merely correcting a small but important oversight, which I seem to be able to see with simple clarity but which others seem less convinced. The oversight of comp is that it presumes that awareness is a logical function which must be produced rather than a property of physical matter. We have good reason to assume this is the case because we can suffer deterioration in awareness, unconsciousness, death, etc. Our consciousness is quite fragile compared to the robust physical systems around us and we see that small changes in functionality of the brain have tremendous effects upon human well being. The key insight is that it is not consciousness itself which is fragile and special, it is the level of elaboration of consciousness - the towering interiority of millions of years of evolution which has specifically developed the human brain to disproportionately elaborate sensorimotive power beyond physiological necessity. That is fragile indeed. Or it would be if there weren't seven billion of us. This minor oversight on the part of comp, generates the assumption that were it not for the brain's physical organization, consciousness would not exist, and the conclusion that anything with the brain's logical- functional architecture would necessarily produce human consciousness. What SEE recognizes, through insight into the role of privacy in sensorimotive phenomena, is that individual reality tunnels are blind to other reality tunnels which do not resemble their own. There may be an inversely proportional relation between isomorphism and sensorimotive blindness (call it AAD - Atrophic Agency Detection) which mercifully sequesters relevant frames of reference through a taxonomy which SEE calls perceptual relativity so we don't have to worry about how each footstep affects the geology, and microbiology of each square inch of underfoot real estate. For people, we can call this merciful sensorimotive inhibition 'sanity'. Too much inhibition however, can have consequences as well. One who is overly medicated or impaired can be robotic and overly theoretical in their approach. Unfeeling and reactionary. This is the flaw in digital reasoning. It fails to appreciate the role of feeling in making human sense, investing full faith in transhuman computation without admitting that there is a significant difference between what we inscribe symbolically and the organism that can do the inscribing and decoding. It sees this difference as a minor fracture which can be sutured up with VFM (Very Fancy Math) sometime in the perpetually receding horizon of the future. In the mean time we will get better and better toys. I have no real trouble with all of that, except that if we really care about understanding what the cosmos actually is, and what we actually are, then I have no qualms about pointing out that the difference between an abstract machine algorithm and a living organism is an insurmountable gap. It's mistaking the menu for the meal, the Mouse for the crowd, etc. What a machine is, is the opposite of sensorimotive phenomena. Is there no room in arithmetic for it's own opposite. An uncomputable non-infinity which is anchored in ordinary experience rather than illuminated technosis? Instead of addressing this failure of math to find 'reality', comp concludes that it is reality which has no reality. I may be reductionist in my view on what 'machines' are able to experience, but I am quite generous in my views on what machines can enable us to experience. -- 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.
