On 17 Mar 2013, at 03:47, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Saturday, March 16, 2013 3:15:43 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 15 Mar 2013, at 20:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:
No, I think that you haven't understood it,
That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is
it that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that
if you have many molecular systems working together mechanically,
you will naturally get emergent properties that could be mistaken
for teleological entities. You can't tell the difference between a
brain change that seems meaningful to you and a meaningful
experience which causes a brain change. Just because you feel like
you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just a narrative
fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.
All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our
universe however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose
for consciousness or narrative fictions. The existence of the
feeling that you can control your body makes no sense in universe
where control is impersonal and involuntary. There is no
possibility for teleology to even be conceived in a universe of
endless meaningless chain reactions - no basis for proprietary
attachment of any kind. It's circular to imagine that it could be
important for an epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal.
Important how? It's like adding a steering wheel to a mountain.
due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your
theory - a theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and
predicts nothing.
No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable,
because falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as
prediction goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are
bound to the extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be
intolerant and misrepresent other perspectives. They will cling
pathologically to unreal abstractions while flatly denying ordinary
experience.
Materialism + computationalism can lead to nihilism. But
computationalism, per se, does not deny ordinary experiences. It
starts from that, as it is a principle of invariance of
consciousness for a digital substitution made at some level.
It may not deny ordinary experiences, but it doesn't support them
rationally either.
It supports them as much as possible. It supports some irrationalism
like non communicable truth on the par of the machine.
What is a reason why computation would be processed as an ordinary
experience, when we clearly can be accomplished through a-signifying
mechanical activities?
You lost me here.
Bruno
Craig
Bruno
Craig
On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Craig Weinberg
<whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:55:26 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:
On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg
<whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of
those ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on
one fixed idea of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing
any other, even if they themselves are sitting on top of it.
The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you
any better if I tried.
Why, do you think that I have never considered the bottom up model
of causation?
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