On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 9:13 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> In fact, even >> you might not be conscious. > > It is not possible to doubt that you are conscious, because doubt > itself is a form of consciousness. But the part of your brain that is doing the doubting, which might be normal, could be fed signals about perceptual data (perception involves consciousness by definition) from non-conscious machinery. The technical issues re this machinery are irrelevant: it is only necessary to consider that it is *possible* to provide the appropriate electrochemical signals without also providing consciousness (the hypothesis entertained in order to disprove it).You would thus believe you had perceptions when in fact you had none. that could be the case now: you could be completely blind, deaf, lacking in emotion but you behave normally and don't realise that anything is wrong. Please think about this paragraph carefully before replying to it - it is essentially the whole argument and you seem to have misunderstood it. >> I assume you think you're conscious, but >> you would still think that if you had a consciousness-destroying >> (according to you) brain lesion that left your neurons functioning >> normally, such as inactivation of DNA. > > No, that's the opposite of what I am saying. If your neurons are not > functioning normally, ie, reduced your brain to the status of a random > organ or silicon chip, you would not think you're conscious; 'you' > would not think. > >>It might have happened a minute >> ago to most of your brain; how could you know that it had not? > > That's where the 3p position breaks down into absurdity. The whole > point of what I've been saying here is that we should each, in our own > minds recognize that idea as a fallacy, follow it back to it's origin, > and rip it out by the roots so we can't ever make the mistake of > naively thinking it again . It doesn't matter if there is a brain > lesion cause to our experience, consciousness is just as much of a > hallucination whether or not it corresponds to some exterior > reference, because experience doesn't 'exist', it insists. Descartes > wasn't right about everything, but the reason that the cogito still > resonates with it's powerful simple truth, is that it cannot be > denied. > > Once you have a foothold on this immutable fact, you can reconcile it > with the immutable facts of science and realize that they are a mirror > image of each other rather than a phenomenon-epiphenomenon. They occur > on the same phenomenon~phenomenon equivalence level. Existence is a > form of insistence, and insistence is a form of existence. They are a > single involuted continuum, but they are never the same thing within a > single PRIF (Perceptual Relativity Inertial Frame) so that my > subjective sensorimotive experience can only look like the consequence > of electromagnetic activity to you. This is how the cosmos works. This > is the solution to the mind-body problem. > > It's up to you now, whether to interiorize this idea, to under-stand > (settle within you) it as your own truth, or to see it as an enemy > idea - a threat to the self which must be defended against through > accusation or inference, suspicion, literalism, intolerance, > sophistry, etc. All of these tools will help restore your interiority > to a state of satisfaction, to reassure you that surely this idea has > no place in pretending at truth. If, however, you apply the spirit of > science rather than the letter, you might be obliged to run your > counter-examples in reverse. What idea is it that you are actually > defending? > > What if you pretend I'm right and argue it that way, just out of > curiosity to see if you might have some confirmation bias? Treat your > own views as you would astrology. Assume that you only believe what > you believe because evolutionary biology has wound up making you as an > entity that thinks it wants to win a debate; because he thinks it will > get him food and sex, and that his opinion on it is the meaningless > arithmetic of a protein and sugar machine designed to keep it's body > alive. If I want you to believe what I'm saying, I have only to modify > your behavior, mechanically, or with reward & punishment conditioning > so that you will act like you believe it. How will you know that you > don't believe it? > > The universe leaves it up to you. If you want to doubt that your life > exists, you are free to do that. You can imagine that you are a > transparent, egoless window of logical observation on the universe, > and because of how the cosmos works, your observations will support > that. It's not a coincidence. If you want to imagine that you are the > universe, and that every moment of your life is part of a divine > order, and that your thoughts are connected with that order directly, > your expectations will be supported in that too. 'What the thinker > thinks, the prover proves.' I'm afraid I don't really understand what you're saying. I just want to know if a machine that behaved as if it were conscious would in fact be conscious. I think it would, otherwise it is possible that I am currently deluded about being conscious, which is absurd. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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. 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