On 15 Aug 2012, at 14:10, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

I disagree about the self not being a social contruct.


When I talk about the self, I am not talking about "you". I think more to the control structure making it possible to have a self. I explain it from time to time, but it is a bit technical. basically it is just a duplicating program in front of itself, like the DNA strands. If Dx gives xx (first intensional diagonalization), then DD gives DD (second intensional diagonalization). We share that self with all living creature from virus to us.




It must at least be partly so, for to my mind, the self
is your memory, and that includes to some extent the world.

Memory is not part of that self, only in a conventional way. You own your memory and brain, you are not your memory and brain.




And the self includes what your think your role is.
At home a policeman may just be a father, but
when he puts on his uniform and stops a car for
speeding, he's a different person.

Not in the technical sense of "person" that I use. I see what you mean, but it is not relevant for the question of how and why "numbers dream".

Bruno





Roger , rclo...@verizon.net
8/15/2012
Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function."
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From: Bruno Marchal
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Time: 2012-08-14, 11:03:48
Subject: Re: on tribes


On 14 Aug 2012, at 14:42, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

I think that your soul is your identity in the form of point of view.

I agree. I use almost that exact definition.



As we grow up we begin to define or find ourselves not out of any great
insight but pragmatically, out of choosing what tribe we belong to.
We define ourselves socially and culturally. We wear their indian
feathers or display their tattoes and are only friendly to our own tribe
or gang. So a liberal won't listen to a conservative and vice versa.
It greatly simplifies thinking and speaking, and is a dispeller of
doubt and tells us with some apparent certainty on who we are.

OK, but that is not the root of the first person self, which can still exist even when completely amnesic. If not you make the first person "I" a social construct, which it is not.

Bruno




So Roger , rclo...@verizon.net
8/14/2012
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Time: 2012-08-12, 10:47:23
Subject: Re: the unitary mind vs the modular brain


On 12 Aug 2012, at 14:28, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

As before, there is the natural, undeniable dualism between brain and mind:

brain   objective and modular
mind   subjective and unitary

OK. You can even say:
brain/body:   objective and doubtable
soul/consciousness: subjective and undoubtable




The brain can be discussed, the mind can only be experienced.

Exactly. I would say the soul, as the mind can be discussed in theories, but the soul is much more complex. We can discuss it through strong assumption like mechanism.




I  believe that the only subjective and unitary item in the universe
is the monad.  It is the eye of the universe, although for us we
can only perceive indirectly.

I am open to this. The monad would be the "center of the wheel", or the fixed point of the doubting consciousness.

The machines already agree with you on this : )
(to prove this you need to accept the most classical axiomatic (modal) definition of belief, knowledge, etc.)

See my paper here for an introduction to the theology of the ideally correct machine:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html

Bruno



Roger , rclo...@verizon.net
8/12/2012
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Time: 2012-08-11, 09:52:29
Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

On 10 Aug 2012, at 14:04, Russell Standish wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or
>>> unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the
>>> total.
>>
>> This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point
>> which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including
>> mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts, >> you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea >> of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be
>> realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have
>> stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think
>> that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'.
>>
>
> With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not follow,
> I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his
> "pandemonia" theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious
> process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the problems
> at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of
> consciousness is to select from among the course of action
> presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly > consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any unifying
> (aka reductive) process may be sufficient.
>
> The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian
> process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution
> is the key to any form of creative process.


The brain parts I was talking about must be enough big and integrated, like an half hemisphere, or the limbic system, etc. What I said should not contradict Daniel Dennett "pandemonia" or Fodor modularity theory,
which are very natural in a computationalist perspective.
Only sufficiently "big" part of the brain can have their own
consciousness as dissociation suggests, but also other experience,
like splitting the brain, or the removing of half brain operation(*)
suggest.
The sleeping or paralysis of the corpus callosum can also leads to a
splitting consciousness, and people can awake in the middle of doing
two dreams at once. This consciousness multiplication does echoed
Darwinian evolution as well, I think.
Yet, I am not sure that Darwin evolution is a key to creativity. It
might be a key to the apparition of creativity on earth, but
creativity is a direct consequence of Turing universality. Emil Post
called creative his set theoretical notion of universal probably for
that reason: the fact that universal machine can somehow contradict
any theories done about them, and transform itself transfinitely often.
Or look at the Mandelbrot set. The formal description is very simple
(less than 1K), yet its deployment is very rich and grandiose. It
might be creative in Post sense, and most natural form, including
biological, seem to appear in it. So very simple iteration can lead to
creative process, and this echoes the fact that consciousness and
creativity might appear more early than we usually thought.

I was of course *not* saying that all parts of the brain are
conscious, to be clear, only big one and structurally connected.

Bruno

(*) See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSu9HGnlMV0


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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