On Sep 28, 9:48 am, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > On 27 Sep 2011, at 20:18, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > Yes, thanks. > > > It's interesting that he goes from showing how neurons plausibly have > > micro-agency, to then insisting in part 7 that we must reduce > > consciousness to-unconsciousness. > > He explains this already in his oldest book "brainstorm". I agree with > him. To explain something consists in reducing it to something we > already understand.
Unless what we are trying to explain is the explainer itself, in which case anything which we reduce it to would actually be further from an explanation. If you reduce it to arithmetic, the you have to explain how arithmetic understands. If you reduce it to neurology then you have to explain how neurology understands. If you leave it sensorimotive, then it is what it is - an experience of sense-making, through which both neurology and arithmetic can be understood. > > The mystery (which just shows how much he is aristotelian) is that he > does not apply this principle to matter. To explain matter, you have > also to reduce it to something which does not refer to matter. Yet he > believes that there is no hard problem for matter, like most scientists. > > But mechanism explains conceptually bot matter and (99,9% of) > consciousness with resect that criteria. It is not 100%, because our > beliefs in number cannot be explained in that way. But then machine > can already explain why it has to be like that. I agree. It's a mistake to overlook the hard problem of matter, but what about the hard problem of mechanism? > > > > > To me, all it takes is to realize that it's not only what the neurons > > are doing physically that matters, but what the neuronal agents > > themselves are perceiving, and how perceptions scale up differently > > than material objects relating across space do. > > Then all interaction are conscious. All interactions are events along a logarithmic continuum of detection~sensation~feeling~perception~awareness~consciousness. I suspect that the phenomenological content is fixed roughly to scale in an absolute sense of microcosm~biochemistry~physiology~zoology~ecology~astrophysics but balloons out relativistically around the subjective niche. It may be completely relativistic, so that if you were a bee in a beehive, your life would be every bit as rich and sophisticated as a human life seems to us - which is certainly possible in theory given the prominence of privacy in subjectivity and how it seems to be magnify our lack of identification outside of our own niche, but I don't think that's the case. I think it would be too redundant if every atom, tree, frog, person, and galaxy had the identical sort of sense-making experience of their universe (niche). Craig -- 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.
