Craig - see below... On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 11:35 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: > They are part of the same thing, although perpendicular (organization > is material forms across volumetric space, experience is entangled > perceptions through sequential time...exact opposites, always.)
This contradicts what you said earlier, when you said experience and organization overlap and influence each other, but not always. I can dig out the reference if you need me to, it was just a couple days ago. >> >> We also apparently agree that it is the interactions among the parts (eg >> the forces), and not what the parts are made of per se, that determines the >> subjectivity > > No, the interactions arise from the parts themselves, just as > civilization arises from a history of actual human beings living and > working together. The culture is not an expression of abstract forces > among people, it is a concrete realization of people themselves, just > as a coral reef is an expression of coral, not reefness. We are basically saying the same thing here. To disagree is to get caught up in semantics. >> (granting your point that different substrates might not have >> identical dynamics). If a silicon organism and a carbon based organism did >> hypothetically experience identical forces, as you say, they would be >> identical. > > Right, because forces are figurative. All forces are experiences of > physical beings (person, asteroid, star, atom, etc). When we > experience our own forces, it's consciousness, life, work, family, > friends, dreams, etc. When we experience something else's forces, it > depends how similar that thing is to us. If it's pretty similar, we > say it's an animal, and it's forces are instincts. If it's a cell or > molecule, we say it's chemical reactions. If it's a physical substance > we say it's energy. It's all one thing - stuff being and doing. Not > beingness and doingness pretending that it's stuff. Again, it's more > useful to model it the wrong way, because that's how we can figure out > how to cheat the system, but if we want to understand what is actually > going on and what consciousness really is, we need to turn it inside > out and come to our own senses. OK, but I will just add my voice to the chorus and ask: how do you know this? Just as Bruno says, you speak as if you know the truth of the matter, when at best all anyone has is a nice model that explains what is happening, and/or simulates such a model to make predictions. After all this time I still don't understand your model, and you haven't made any predictions in spite of your religious confidence in your theory. My hunch is that you have developed strong intuitions over the years and formulated what, to you, feels like a cohesive integration of all your intuitions about the way the world is, and gave it a name. The funny thing, to me, is that many of your intuitions *would* make you a computationalist, except that you have an even stronger intuition in the primacy of "sense" and its assumed symmetry with electromagnetic force (and nuclear forces, and gravity). However, once you make "sense" primary, you assume what is to be explained (as Bruno says), and just as bad, there is still the mystery of how the sense/force symmetry works, how it can have "bidirectional causality", and so on. It has never been clear what the payoff is for going along with all that - it's an awful lot to assume out of the gate. I hope it is apparent that I have made an honest attempt to understand your ideas, but I don't really expect you to be able to answer my queries in a way that satisfies my curiosity and desire for coherence, because my impression is that you are too invested in your worldview to look at it from a skeptical outsider's point of view. Instead, my expectation is that you will tell me I'm wrong, or that I haven't made the effort, or you will continue to use imprecise language and metaphors to explicate what is ultimately a haphazard pile of disconnected and fuzzy intuitions, when what would make me happy is some equations and some predictions. That's why Bruno's ideas are compelling, because he actually has equations and predictions and a story for the mind/body problem that doesn't assume anything but elementary math... pretty awesome when you think about it, wouldn't you say? Even if he's wrong, that's a hell of a contribution. Terren -- 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.
