On Thursday, March 21, 2013 9:06:51 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: > > On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 12:03 AM, Craig Weinberg > <[email protected]<javascript:>> > wrote: > > > To recap then, the difference between non-living and living is only > visible > > to the living. Biological units are vastly larger and slower, more > > vulnerable in a thousand ways than molecular units, but they are a sign > of a > > nested relation of experiences. The experience that is associated with > the > > cell (and this is tricky because it is not ultimately 'the cell's > > experience', like our lives are not 'our body's experience') has > 'leveled > > up' from the inorganic, and enjoys a richer, more wonderful/awful range > of > > sensitivities - which is the purpose of the universe (or at least the > half > > of the universe that can have a purpose). > > There is surely a difference between living and non-living, but > nevertheless it is possible to get living from non-living.
Not without the potential for life already present in the universe. If there was a universe which contained only non-living substances, there would be no logical possibility for anything like "life". There isn't even a way to assume that there could be sanity or coherence enough to define any of the qualities of life. > It is also > possible to get intentional from non-intentional, which is what you > disputed. > It is also possible that I would accidentally think that you have done something here other than repeat your assertions. It is meaningless to say that you can get intention from non-intention, or life from non-life unless you have some 'how', 'why', and 'where' to back it up. I can say that you can get real estate from a cartoon too. > >> > Laughing at a joke demonstrates that semantic content causes physical > >> > responses. Any activity in the brain which relates to anything in the > >> > world > >> > or the mind has nothing to do with neurochemistry. Physical processes > >> > can > >> > induce experiences, but only because experiences are a priori part of > >> > the > >> > cosmos. There is nothing about the physical processes which you > >> > recognize > >> > which could possibly relate laughter to a joke, or anger to an > >> > injustice, > >> > etc. There is no way for your physics of the brain to represent > anything > >> > except the brain. > >> > >> The claim is that the physics explains all of the physical activity. > > > > > > That's tautological. Economics explains all of the economic activity. > That > > doesn't mean that a person can be understood by their economic > transactions > > alone. > > Physics will not explain to an observer your experience since only you > know your experience, but it will completely explain your behaviour, > since everyone can see your behaviour. Only things with eyes can see my behavior. Of things that have eyes, only those things who are sized roughly larger than a cockroach and smaller than an office building are going to be able to parse my behavior as detectable. There is no such thing as "everyone can see X". Likewise, our physics can only see those things which our instruments can examine, which is only things very much like the instruments themselves. Radiotelescopes don't get jokes, they don't comfort the sick, etc. > At one level it is correct to > say your experience influences your behaviour, but all that an > observer will see is the physical process underlying the experience > influencing the behaviour. They aren't going to see anything if what is underlying the behavior is semantic. If I decide to drive to Georgia tomorrow, there is nothing in my brain that is going to explain my behavior of suddenly driving to Georgia tomorrow. That influence cannot be reverse engineered from neurology, unless, perhaps, the entire history of the universe is simulated as well. > If this is not so and some behaviours are > directly caused by experience without going through the usual chain of > physical causation then the observer would see something magical > happening. > This is the usual physical causation, but it is not a chain. It is one physical thing. My will to move my arm is the mobilization of every process, every cell, every tissue and organ that we see moving and changing. It's not magical, it's ordinary. What is magical is the idea of cells that need some physical mechanism satisfied by making my body drive to Georgia. > > >> A > >> door does not open unless someone or something pushes it, whether it's > >> a person, a gust of wind, the reaction from a decaying radioisotope > >> in the wood, or whatever. If the door is a little one inside the brain > >> that does NOT mean it opens without any identifiable physical cause. > > > > > > But all physical causes are thought to originate in quantum fluctuations > > from within. Those fluctuations are known to be probabilistic and > > self-entangling. > > And describable by physics. Radioactive decay is a good example. It is > thought to be truly random when an atom will decay, in that there is > no deterministic formula that can predict this even if we know > everything about the atom and its environment. It could happen in the > next second, it could happen in a billion years. However, it is easy > to calculate accurately what proportion a large collection of such > atoms will decay; much easier than many processes that are > deterministic. Deterministic does not necessarily mean predictable and > random does not necessarily mean unpredictable. > But self-determination does mean predictable - for me, and it means that processes which have statistical play in them can and will be influenced directly by my intentions. > >> If the little door opens in response to a joke it is because the > >> physical manifestations of the joke (sound waves) cause some other > >> physical process which makes it open. It does NOT open because the > >> joke just magically makes it open, which is what would appear to > >> happen if consciousness had a direct causal effect on matter. > > > > > > I understand exactly what you think that I don't understand, but you're > > wasting your time. I understand your position completely. Your view is > that > > the joke is merely the decoded set of neurological patterns associated > with > > whatever processed vibrations or collisions of the sense organs that > have > > introduced the encoded patterns to your body. You think that, like a > > computer, there is a code input and an evolutionarily programmed > response > > which generates an output. > > Yes, although of course evolution cannot directly program a response > to a joke. Evolution programs the potential for a brain, which then > grows in fantastically complex ways in response to the environment. > Except, in, you know, every other species on Earth, where it doesn't do much fantastic complex evolving in response to the same environment. > > > What I am saying is that model could work in theory, but in reality, > that is > > not at all what is happening with the nervous system or our awareness. > What > > is happening is both simpler and more complex but you have to begin by > > throwing out the assumption that anything is ever decoded by the brain > into > > an experience. There is no decoder, and none is possible. That would be > like > > installing a flat screen TV inside an abacus, and then building eyes in > the > > abacus to see the TV. The abacus would then have to go through this > > meaningless exercise of converting some of its calculations to the > screen in > > one part of the abacus in order to receive them in another, and it would > be > > ridiculous since you end up right where you started, with data turning > into > > itself. > > What we have as an empirical fact is that certain physical processes > A, B, C are associated with experiences a, b, c. Yes. > There can be no > change in a without a change in A, although there can be a change in A > without a change in a. No. There can be no change in A without a change in a also. The experiences may be not be personal experiences which we can be conscious of whenever we want, but they are associated with some kind of experience on some level that can be related back to our life. > Thus a is said to supervene on A. Do you deny > this relationship? Yes, the relation is what I call Ouroborean or involuted interaction. Physics is shaped by will, will is shaped by sense, sense is shaped by physics. Sense cheats. It operates through metaphor and coincidence, time-slipped simultaneity. We are in the movie, but sense is the director. You are looking at the grain of the film but the movie isn't there, it's in the perception and participation of the cast and crew. > Do you have a proposed mechanism for it? > Yes. Oroborean monism. Physics supervenes reflexively on its own capacities to experience. Interaction is not logical but self-evident, with multivalent causation to and from private intention and public extension as ordinary sensory-motor participation. A, B, and C are really Az, By, and Cx. They are each a syzygy and they are a larger syzygy together. > > > Instead of seeing the whole thing like some kind of moron's Chess game, > > where each move is a dumb response to the other in an endless chain > > reaction, we should see the Chess game as merely an extension of the > game > > players and game makers. The better the Chess player, the more they can > > telegraph their moves (motives) strategically. They are playing an > entire > > game at once, not just reacting. The game limits their ability to push > out > > their entire vision all at once, but that doesn't mean that the entire > game > > is not being advanced by an overarching desire. On every level there are > > desires, plans, and capacities. The player can only express herself > through > > the game (physics) but she can add new games (chemistry, geology, > genetics, > > biology, zoology, anthropology, technology) by building them from the > > simpler examples of Chess. > > But the desires, plans and capacities all supervene on dumb physical > processes. Why do you assume so? What you think of as physical processes are linear moments added together in time. Plans and desires can spawn any number of dumb physical processes to satisfy an agenda which dumb but intentional, teleological, and sourced beyond moments of time. Plans shape time. They control the brain, which controls the body, which controls the environment. > Break these processes and the subjective processes also > break. So what? Unplug the TV and your TV show breaks. It's true that a sword can stop a person's heart, but the idea for armor can stop a sword. In the big picture, consciousness is much more precious and important then matter. Consciousness needs a vehicle to add realism and multiply its own significance, but without consciousness, matter cannot exist in any way that is substantially different from not existing. Yes, matter is important to us as human beings, but to the universe, matter is a near infinite resource without any intrinsic value. > Understand the physical processes and you understand exactly > how the game will play out, You can only detect subordinate physical processes. There are new games all the time, and the one we are in cannot be predicted by the players. > although you will not understand the > associated subjectivity. Yes. Understanding the physical process can only tell you something if you already have the experience to correlate with and develop expectations and inferences. Without the experience, physical process tells you nothing. It is possible that a chess playing computer > has associated, quite alien subjectivity. We don't see this, but > aliens observing humans playing chess would not see it in us either. > I agree in theory, but in fact that theory is based on assumptions which are not necessarily true. It may not be the case that moments in time are interchangeable, and that material forms can be isolated from their history. We look at a body or brain in a moment and we see mazes within mazes of pulsating bodies - but that is because we are looking at the 'side view' - a public cross section. We aren't seeing the trillions of stories which have been going on for billions of years behind each of those cells. That's why building the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas isn't replicating Paris. The universe you are assuming is a human universe of the impatient Western mind. What I assume is that we can't assume anything unless we have no choice. What we have seen is that machines are not behaving like organisms. What I suggest is that there may be a very good reason for that, but we can't know what it is until we stop assuming that the public body is the whole picture. It is tricky with technology, because on the one hand, everything has experience, but on the other hand not everything has the experience that we might expect. In technology, we may expect too much, and in nature, too little. > > What you are doing is looking at the movie and telling me "If there were > a > > director or producer, you would see the actors talking to them in the > > movie". Stop looking for the camera in the movie - you are the camera > > already. > > It is not obvious in the movie, but if the director directs he must > have communicated with the actors in some way, otherwise it's magic. > If you were in the movie, yes. If you are an Amazon tribesman watching a movie and don't know anything about how they are made, you would have no way to infer the existence of the circumstances of film making. Similarly, it's not obvious looking at someone laughing at a joke but > there must be some sort of physical chain of causation at play, > otherwise it's magic. > Every time you or John says "otherwise it's magic", it just says to me "nothing can be real except what I expect to be real". It's tautological to ask what the relation between experience and matter is if you are going to say a priori that it can be nothing other than a 'chain of causation'. There's no chain of causation, there is a personal experience with multiple sub-personal experiences, reflected publicly as impersonal body interactions. The body interactions are partly simultaneous and spontaneous, and they have cascading automatic consequences. You could induce laughter from the body, by tickling for instance, and then you have the laughter experience as a quasi-involuntary reflex consequence. It goes both ways. Multivalent causation. Az, By, Cx. Craig > > > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
