On Sep 23, 2011, at 12:25 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Sep 22, 9:04 pm, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Stephen P. King
<stephe...@charter.net>wrote:
From what I understand of Craig's theory it describes a difference
between
first person and third person experience/reality. Each being two
sides of
the same coin, where first person experience is the interior side
of what
its like to be the material. The first person experience of is
indeterminable (and possibly relies on the indeterminism of
physics?) and
can cause physical changes above and beyond what can be predicted
by any
third-person physics. While we are a machine according to this
theory, we
are a special machine due to our history as organisms and the
special
properties of the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. which
form the
basis of our biochemistry. Functional equivalence is either not
possible,
or will lead to various brain disorders or zombies.
[SPK]
Hi Jason!
Excellent post!! But can you see how this is really not so
different
from Bruno's "result"?! Bruno just substitutes (N, +, *) of matter
and the
1p experience is the 'inside dream" of Arithmetic. Same basic
outline, very
different semantics, but a radically different interpretation...
Both theories suggest that neither matter nor first person
experience are
what is commonly understood, but aside from that it seems little is
in
common. To me there is a big difference between saying first person
experience is a dream inside of arithmetic compared to a an innate
sense
capability of substance (carbon atoms, electromagnetic fields,
neurons, I am
not sure which).
To me, the difference is that substance physically exists but dreams
and arithmetic are metaphysical abstractions. The sense capability not
only extends to all substance (anything that you can detect in public
also has an undetectable private interiority) but it is sense which
defines substance in the first place.
Reality is made of feelings of reality in addition to the arithmetic
correspondences of those feelings, as opposed to feeling being an
abstraction which inexplicably and redundantly arises from computation
alone. The feeling has it's own experiential ontology.
Bruno's result is well-defined, refutable, does not reject the
physical laws
as currently understood, and does not make unfounded assertions,
such as:
only certain materials can experience red, no computer program can
feel,
think, understand, etc.
We know for a fact that color blindness occurs as a result of material
differences in people's retina. We also know that you cannot see red
on a black and white TV set.
Both of these are a result of no information representing a difference
(in the colors) making it to the brain.
I don't understand that the assertion
that only certain materials can experience red is controversial. Do
you have a counterfactual?
Red light isn't needed to experience red.
That no computer program can feel is not possible to verify without
directly connecting your brain to a computer, but it's not much of a
stretch to see that it is of course true. I've illustrated many
reductio ad absurdum examples of attributing feeling to programmatic
logic:
You've given absurd examples, not reductio ad absurdam proofs.
- the DVD player would have to watch movies with us,
- the ventriloquist dummy would have to learn it's own act
eventually,
- the trash can with the words THANK YOU stamped on the lid would have
to sincerely mean it,
- you would be tempted to feel remorse if you hurt your computer's
feelings or turned it off before it was ready.
These don't follow at all.
It goes on and on and on. The only counterfactuals that have been
suggested are speculative fiction and promissory materialism.
Conversion disorders and illegibility illustrate that pattern
recognition is not automatically or inevitability provided with
pattern to any particular perceiving subject.
Craig does make a big deal about "special properties" but the
properties of
carbon, etc. do matter when it comes to real functionality.
It's not that the properties of carbon are objectively special, it's
that they are special *to us* because the sense that we make is an
elaboration of the sense that organic chemistry makes, and not
inorganic chemistry. Mammals are special to us because we share a
common sense with all mammals (that we don't share with reptiles),
etc.
What is real though? In what level or context? Craig ignores the
concept
of different levels in his arguments and in our replies.
*headdesk* My entire hypothesis is about levels and contexts.
When he says only
carbon and oxygen can combust and produce *real* heat,
I don't say that carbon is required for combustion. I just said that
fire requires oxygen by definition, because fire is a way of
describing our perception of oxidation.
and we tell him sim
carbon and sim oxygen can produce *real* heat to the sim observer
he expects
that heat to appear also in the higher level universe conducting the
simulation.
No, I point to that expectation as an absurd consequence of devout
comp. Sim fire cannot produce any kind of heat to a sim observer
unless that observer has sim thermal receptors which are also made of
sim animal flesh, made of sim cells, made of sim organic molecules.
Okay so you agree that if we simulated an observer and their tissues,
cells, atoms, etc. then it would be heat to the sim obsever?
'Heat' does not just appear from a picture of fire - even a really
nicely rendered 3D picture.
Sure, I agree.
What function of the brain cannot be determined with anything other
than a
carbon atom? If we can use the behavior of other systems to
predict what a
carbon would do then the carbon atom is dispensible to the
functions and
behavior of the brain.
So all you have to do is predict what a brick of gold would do and
then the gold itself is dispensable? I can just go to a bank and
explain that I could make simulate gold arithmetically and expect that
to count as a deposit.
You can't take the stuff in your dreams with you when you wake up. We
can access a universe full of gold through simulation, but the only
thing we can take from it is information.
You can then argue that this results in a mindless
automaton, but then you run into all the funny and absurd issues with
philisophical zombies.
The idea of p-zombies arise out of the a priori assumption of
functionalism. There are no funny or absurd issues with conversion
disorders or HADD.
While it is true that we can build universal Turing machine
equivalents out
of practically anything, explaining and modeling the physical
world is not
about computations that do not require resources or can run
forever or such
"ideal" things, it is about how all this stuff that has particular
properties interacts with each other. We simply cannot dismiss all
of the
details that encompass our reality by just invoking computational
universality. What is that truism? The Devil is in the Details!
Craig posits an infinite devil, but does so without evidence. And
contrary
to evidence from physics, chemistry, neurology, etc.
I am the evidence, and so are you. I don't posit anything infinite as
far as I know.
If there are no infinities then a Turing machine can reproduce
function. If functional behavior can be replicated and and there is
no consciousness then the result is a p-zombie.
You could say that a unique event is infinitely like
itself if you want but it's a rather oblique way of thinking about it.
As I have said before, if you think that anything that I have said is
contrary to evidence from physics, chemistry, neurology, etc, then I
know for a fact that you do not understand what I'm saying.
Frankly I have grown tired of debating Craig's thesis because his
responses
ignore everything we say, and he has admitted as much: that nothing
we say
will convince him he is wrong. Only interviewing someone who has
received a
partial digital neural prosthesis can do that.
If you are able to consider the possibility that I'm not wrong, then
my behavior will make sense. I have not, to my knowledge, ignored
anything that any of you have said, and I try to address each point
directly.
You respond to the things I say, but without taking into consideration
the consequences that are implied and what it means for your theory.
Jason
My own thesis follows this same outline, except that I propose
that the
topological spaces are the "outside" and algebras (which would
include
Bruno's (N, +, *) and minds are the inside. This outline dispenses
with the
problem of psycho-physical parallelism that I will make a comment
on below.
There is no need to explain why or how matter and mind are
harmonized or
synchronized when, ultimately, they are jsut two different
(behaviorally and
structuraly) aspect of each other, all of this follow from M.
Stone's
representation theorem.
Do you agree that computers can be conscious?
My idea is a bit tricky because we have to treat topological
spaces
(such as the totally disconnected compact Hausdorff spaces dual to
Boolean
logics) both as the form and content of 1p and as mathematical
objects. This
is not a problem because math is all about representing 1p and
more! This
makes sense because mathematical representations can both represent
themselves and be what they represent. WE see this explained in a
round
about way in Stephen Wolfram's essay on intractability and
physics. The
basic idea of the essay is that physical systems are, effectively,
the best
possible computational model of themselves. We do not need to
postulate
computations separate from the physical processes themselves, if
we are
going to stay int eh semi-classical realm. If we wish to go to a
fully
quantum model, they the wavefunction (and its evolution) of a
physical
system is the computation itself of that system.
Vaughan Pratt argued that QM is just a consequence of the way
that the
stone duality is implemented. I am just taking this ideas and
exploring them
for flaws and falsification, but to do so I have to be able to
fully explain
them (not an easy job!) but that is what is necessary to claim
that I
understand them.
This assessment of Craig's idea seems accurate from what I can
tell at
the start but falls down on the epiphenomena bit AFAIK...
Consciousness to Craig is an epiphenomenon, since he has said
there is no
reason to evolve this tehnicolor cartesian theater.
No, human consciousness is a phenomenon which has evolved from hominid
awareness, mammal perception, amphibian feeling...etc all the way down
to cellular sensation and molecular detection. The common thread of
sense is primitive, not an epiphenomenon, and so is substance - it's
equally primitive opposite.
I need to get his comment on this statement about the Cartesian
theater.
Okay.
The problem with the Cartesian theater is that it tries to make
experience into a substance. Like phlogiston, aether, soul, etc. It's
understandable - we want to conceive of ourselves as objects, but my
hypothesis explains that this approach is critically flawed. We are
not a substance, because substance is nothing but our perception of
that which is not us. The duality is total, meaning that matter across
space on one side does not translate into some other kind of
theatrical matter/space on the other side, but rather translates as
the opposite of matter/space: experience/time.
It's a monumental shift in interpretation to realize that energy is in
fact an experience of matter, but it is the truth, and I think any
kind of thought experiment grounded in reality will bear that out.
The reason I say it is an epiphenomenon is that if there is no
reason to
evolve it, then human behavior would be unaltered with its
absence. Thus
its presence makes no difference one way or the other according to
his
theory.
No, there is just no biological reason to evolve it. The presence of
consciousness of course makes all the difference - to us, but it makes
no difference to what we think of as our biology. Human behavior would
be altered by the absence of consciousness because human behavior is
not determined entirely by biological imperatives. It has semantic
imperatives, psychological, mythological, sociopolitical, artistic,
scientific, philosophical agendas.
Craig
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