On Aug 1, 3:07 pm, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > On 01 Aug 2011, at 01:12, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > I don't see why it has to be infinite and I don't see what's wrong > > with non Turing. > > We will come back on this. Normally sane04 explains this. I have to go > now, > > Meanwhile you might think on how to explain what you mean by > "sensorimotive", without doing any poetry, so that anybody can > understand clearly what you mean.
Unfortunately sensorimotive is by definition poetic in part, because it is the ontological complement to electromagnetism, which is non- poetic, literal, and mechanical. Electromagnetism is nothing more than patterns observed in the behavior of matter. The experience of those behaviors are sensorimotive. As an electric circuit is a contiguous material loop through which 'current' flows between positive and negative poles, the experience of that circuit can be modeled as a feeling or sense of disequilibrium which motivates an intention to complete the circuit - which it will seek to do whatever way it can. Of course that's just a theory, we can't know what it's like to be a single electric circuit like that, but we can know that our experiences are conducted through our nervous system, and that nervous system can be understood to have sensory and motor functions, and that those functions as experiential input and output are ontological conjugates. Together, the sensorimotive function on the scale of an organism can be called perception or sentience. We make sense of ourselves and our environment and we are motivated by that sense to try to complete the sensorimotive circuit which is presented. The difference between something like semiconductors or copper wire circuits from neurological circuits is more than just complexity. Complexity is necessary but not sufficient for bringing about consciousness, feeling, and understanding. Why this is boils down to the same reason why we would want to use semiconductors instead of neurons in the first place. There are different physical (electromagnetic) characteristics which make wires and chips much easier to work with. If that were not the case, there would be no debate because we would 'simply' use cheap, sugar powered brain chips instead. There are things that cells do that a chip can't easily do, and vice versa. Higher forms of consciousness is one of the former. The problem is that if we a priori define the universe as computation, we disqualify the other form of escalation: signification. Complexity alone is not significance. A cell is more than molecules, and I propose that the reason that molecules keep organizing themselves into cells is that they get something out of it. I don't know if the shared experience of being a cell is vicarious or direct, but like any kind of human belonging, there is a motive there and a sense. >From a mechanical perspective, sense is the many to one input while motive is the one to many output, but it's the sense of the experiential content which is input and output as intention, not just an encoded exterior 'signal'. Indeed our modern media technology demonstrates how the sense that we make as human beings can easily be encoded in many different signal translation architectures. It's not the form of the signal that matters from the sensorimotive perspective, it's what sense the receiver can make of the signal. What I think comp does is imagine that signal form must equate with signal content, particularly given the success of miniaturization in processing enormously complex signals. I think this goes along with the conception of electromagnetism as disembodied forces and fields, quantum mechanical probability waves, etc as the overreaching of abstraction to compensate for the disqualification of sensorimotive phenomena because it doesn't mix well with existing theoretical approaches and Enlightenment era traditions. > I remind you that honest scientists admit not to understand, in the > scientific way, what is the nature of matter, nor the nature of mind, > so it will not help to allude on this. It might make sense to allude > on some property of mind and/or matter that we might share the > intuition with you. What's wrong with understanding the nature of mind and matter? I admit to not knowing whether or not my understanding will be contradicted by some greater sense making effort, but I don't think that there is inherently anything less presumptuous about focusing on granular details of these phenomena rather than sketching out the big picture. Craig http://s33light.org -- 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.
