On 4/20/2012 2:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 19 Apr 2012, at 22:04, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Hmm... They are not aware of the mind body problem
Nor am I aware of any such problem. The hardest part of the mind body "problem" is
figuring out what the hell the problem is.
There tuns of books. You might try McGuin, if you have a problem with Nagel. Michael Tye
wrote a good book too. See the references in my URL.
The religious demand a explanation of mind, by which they mean give a description of
mind in terms of something other than mind, as using a thing to define itself is rather
pointless;
That is what we can do with recursion equation. It explains self-reproduction and
self-reference. See my paper "amoeba, planaria and dreaming machine".
so scientists do so and explain mind in terms of X (biological brains, electronic
computers, abstract Turing Machines, and other things that are not mind ), but when
they do so the religious complain "but X is not mind!". Well of course X is not mind,
if they explained mind in terms of mind then it would be a pretty silly explanation,
That depends on the theory you are choosing. And it is indeed a priori more easy to
explain something immaterial, like consciousness from something immaterial, like
numbers, than from primary matter, which we still don't know what it is, or if that exists.
I don't think you have to explain it from *primary* matter. In fact it is usually
explained in terms of electrochemistry of neurons and hormones, which are several steps up
from quarks and electrons which themselves may not be primary.
but fortunately they use things other than mind to explain how mind works.
Elimanating often the qualia and consciousness. Material explanation explains only the
behavior.
I'm not convinced though that comp is any better. It comes down to saying qualia are
computations seen from the inside. But you could as well say they are brain processes
seen from the inside.
By the way I read Krauss's "A Universe from Nothing" a few weeks ago and thought it was
excelent.
He does not explain where the physical laws come from, nor does he addressed the
consciousness issue.
But of course you need to develop your understanding of the mind-body problem. The
english literature contains many good texts. Then the UDA explains how to reformulate
the problem into a purely arithmetical problem.
But at the expense of turning physics and everything else into an arithmetical problem.
The problem I see with the UDA is that its passivity is contagious. In order to function
as an AI in the world it needs more and more of the world to be subsumed into it's
computation.
Brent
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ <http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/>
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