On 12/22/2012 7:11 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
We defeat Dennett by showing that the regress cannot occur when
there are physical resources required by the computations for each
level of the recursion. We can cutoff recursions in our algorithms
with code: if count of loops is 10, stop. But physical systems can
not count, they just run out of juice after a while....
Yes. For example, in the simulation argument, you still end up having
to have an ultimate reality which is no longer a simulation.
Hi Telmo,
Why? Why does there "need to be" a "ultimate reality" that is some
kind of irreducible ground? It is unnecessary to postulate such if we
look at things from a non-well founded or "Net of Indra" point of view.
Any set of objects can act as a ground for some other, objects are,
ultimately, just bundles of relatively stable persistent properties.
This way of thinking is very different from the "atoms in a void" view...
But if there is no display, we do not need an observer self,
and are possibly ending up with Michael Dennett's materialist
concept of the self. This might be called epi-phenominalism.
The self is simply an expression of the brain.
I don't believe it is just an expression of the brain (I suspect
you don't either), but part of the reason why I don't believe is
1p, so I cannot communicate it (can I?). I don't know. I tried at
dinner parties and got funny looks.
I do think that the consciousness is an expression of the
brain *and* all of its environment that molds its behavior. It is
silly to think that skin is the boundary that a mind associates with!
Agreed.
OK! ;-)
We cannot forget causal closure in our reasoning about 1p!
Telmo, can't you see that the defining characteristic of 1p is
that one cannot communicate it?
I can.
Only I can know exactly what it is like to be me. So I can infer
or bet that you have a "what it is like to be Telmo" but I cannot
know it, by definition and this relation is symmetrical between
any pair of conscious entities.
Ok, but why shouldn't I just believe in solipsism then?
Because solipsism is self-contradictory, we can believe in it
tacitly, but once we think of yourself actively, it falls apart as a
theory. Even the self that one was previously, that one can recollect or
remember, is not oneself now. The self v other relation actively denies
solipsism, and yet we cannot have certainty of what we cannot directly
experience. The trick is to understand that we can only have certainty
of our own experience of self-in-the-moment, as Descartes explained so
well in /Meditations/.
I do not at present know the answer.
Consider dual aspect monism! It works!
What's the best place to read about it?
/The Conscious Mind/ by David Chalmers
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conscious_Mind> is the best source.
--
Onward!
Stephen
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