On 12/24/2012 11:22 AM, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Stephen P. King
IMHO Only the Supreme Monad (the One, God), and perhaps flies
to some extent can clearly see "ultimate" reality, which means from
all perspectives at once. How do flies unify their vision ?
Dear Roger,
Flies can unify their vision because the distance between their
individual eyes is small and the number is finite. One can still manage
to get a mutually commuting set of observations in these conditions.
When one has an arbitrarily large distance between a pair of "eyes" and
the number of them is infinite then it is impossible to have a mutually
commuting set of observations. This is the problem of omniscience.
We ourselves are incapable of that, we can only see reality only
from our perspective, and with some distortions.
[Roger Clough], [[email protected]]
12/24/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Stephen P. King
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-12-22, 12:59:35
Subject: Re: How visual images are produced in the brain. Was Dennett
rightafter all ?
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.
--
Onward!
Stephen
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