On 4/27/2012 11:07 AM, 1Z wrote:
On Apr 27, 6:50 pm, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 4/27/2012 10:42 AM, 1Z wrote:
On Apr 27, 6:13 pm, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 4/27/2012 7:29 AM, 1Z wrote:
On Apr 25, 10:25 pm, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 4/25/2012 11:45 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 24.04.2012 22:22 meekerdb said the following:
...
As I've posted before, when we know how look at a brain and infer what
it's thinking and we know how to build a brain that behaves as we want,
in other words when we can do consciousness engineering, the "hard
problem" will be bypassed as a metaphysical non-question, like "Where
did the elan vital go?"
Brent
This is a position expressed by Jeffrey Gray as follows (he does not share it):
What looks like a Hard Problem will cease to be one when we have understood the
errors
in our ways of speaking about the issues involved. If the route were
successful, we
would rejoin the normal stance: once our head have been straightened out,
science could
again just get on with the job of filling in the details of empirical knowledge.
Evgenii
http://blog.rudnyi.ru/tag/jeffrey-a-gray
I think the main mistake in formulating the 'hard problem' is thinking that we
can't
explain consciousness with mathematical theories like mechanics, astrophysics,
quantum
mechanics. The mistake isn't that we can explain consciousness, it's supposing
that we
can explain physics. We don't explain mechanics or gravity or electrodynamics
- we have
models for them that work, they are predictive and can be used to control and
design
things. Bruno points out that *primitive matter* doesn't add anything to
physics. When
asked what explained the gravitational force Newton said, "Hypothesi non
fingo". Someday,
consciousness will be looked at similarly.
Brent
Is that any different to regarding cosnc. as fundamental, as dualists
do?
I think it is. We don't regard elan vital as fundamental, we just gave up
looking for
it. We decided life is a process, not a substance.
Brent
So if I decide consc. is a process not a substance, will my pains stop
hurting and my food stop tasing and my vision stop being colourful?
Not unless that stops the process.
Brent
And will ceasing to look for any kidn of cosnc. beyond the process
mean i can explain
why pains hurt, etc? I seem to recall that we stopped lookign for Elan
Vital after we came
up with better explanations, not vice versa.
I said that we'd stop asking the 'hard question' when we had consciousness engineering.
Being able to manipulate and synthesize something is a 'better explanation' in a different
sense of 'explanation'. We never explained where the elan vital was or where it came
from. We just came up with a different kind of 'explanation'.
Brent
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