On 19 Apr 2013, at 22:39, Terren Suydam wrote:
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 3:46 PM, Craig Weinberg
<whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Friday, April 19, 2013 11:49:17 AM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:37 AM, Craig Weinberg
<whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Friday, April 19, 2013 11:05:28 AM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Stathis Papaioannou
<stat...@gmail.com> wrote:
But you claim that it is impossible to conceive of consciousness
supervening on function. A religious person would claim that it
impossible to conceive of consciousness as residing anywhere other
than in the spiritual realm. Both your positions seem to essentially
be based on the argument from incredulity: see, this lump of coal is
inert and dead, how could anything derived from it possibly have
feelings?
Craig's "theory" is essentially equivalent with explaining
consciousness in terms of the religious 'soul'.
Nope. Soul is anthropmorphic. Sense is generic and universal. I am
talking physics, not religion.
It's a distinction without a difference. Making it generic and
universal as opposed to anthropomorphic doesn't change anything...
it is still the uncomputable "generator" of qualia.
That's like saying that there is no difference between saying that
ions are electrically charged and saying that atoms have little
invisible men pushing them around. Soul is a concept which lends
itself to supernatural inhabitants of natural bodies - I am not
talking about that at all. I am talking about perception and
participation being the absolute fundamental meta-noumena.
Except that you don't articulate any demonstrable difference between
a universe in which experience is fundamental, and the deterministic
physics of mainstream science (as your exchange with Stathis shows,
e.g. you repeatedly deny that you need to show how ion channels
would do anything differently than what physics would expect them to
do), except for one thing - that "intention" flows downward and
affects the lowest levels, and it does this in a way that is not
computable (i.e. not in obeyance of any kind of law). That viewpoint
is indistinguishable from soul, which is also not computable.
But Craig is right on this, with respect to comp. If you define the
soul by the knower, like Plotinus, and if you define the knower by the
Theaetetus' method (to know p = to believe p + p is true), you get
something (the soul) which appears to be non definable by the machine,
and not computable, from that machine-soul perspective. Arithmetic is
full of non computable entities, and they pay some role when the
machine looks inward.
The problem with Craig is that he want experience to be primitive, and
for this it needs a primitive matter (despite what he says), and a
primitive and magical link between.
He argues that "sense" is primary, and that the top-down causality
of intention translates to the bottom-up causality of physics,
Not always, not. There is bottom up, top down, inside out, outside
in...all kinds of causality.
Makes no difference.
How do you figure? If you accuse me of stealing bread because you
are the only baker in the world, and I insist that I also can bake
bread, and so can many others, how does that make no difference to
the presumptuousness of your accusation?
The only charge you need to answer for is an uncomputable causality
that somehow affects the world in a way that is undetectable by
physics -
People like John Clark seems to believe also in non computable
causality, when he says that indeterminacy can be something physical.
Single worlder have to believe in that kind of magic.
this is indistinguishable from "soul". The other kinds of causality
you mention (whatever those mean) are either from computable sources
(in agreement with physics) or uncomputable sources (and thus also
indistinguishable with soul).
and, crucially, that top-down intention is not computable, i.e. that
it is not possible for such top-down intention to emerge in any kind
of simulation, at any level. This is almost exactly the same thing
as saying that what animates us is our god-given soul.
Nope. I am saying that top-down intentions emerge from proprietary
diffractions of the eternal experience. It's more Vedic or Taoist
than Christian, but where I differ from Vedic or Taoist conceptions
is that I do not see matter as illusion or Maya, but as the concrete
public presentations which orthomodularly re-present private
experiences.
In what conceivable way does "proprietary diffractions of the
eternal experience" differ from something equally as ambiguous as
"divine spark"?
Spark of what? Divine = what?
My description is precise. The universe is an experience, our own
experience is a nested set of sub-experiences within that. What is
the big witchcraft here? Are you denying that experience is real?
Are you offering an explanation for why experience would ever arise
from non-experience?
I have no idea what a divine spark is. I can invent a story about it
though, or parrot other stories I've heard about it. But they are
just stories.
Your story lacks a lot of details that I have asked about before.
For instance, if the universe is an experience, why don't I have
that experience... why do I have my own personal, embodied
experience? What sorts of entities larger than myself also have
experiences, all the way up to the universe, and why? You've said
before that the atoms in my body all have experiences. I assume the
cells in my body do too. How do you characterize the kinds of
systems that have particular kinds of bounded experiences, rather
than everything just experiencing the one universal experience?
Your story reminds me of astrology, because you use a lot of jargon
and "precision" to convey an aura of legitimacy that under closer
inspection breaks down into nothing more than story telling. After
the year or more of being exposed to your ideas, I have yet to see
you articulate one single fact of consequence that could be used to
give actual legitimacy to your ideas. You even have Stathis giving
you ideas on how to do this (experiments he has proposed to test
e.g. whether systems made of non-identical but functionally
equivalent materials would behave the same or differently) but for
whatever reason you choose not to go down that path. Why is that?
Such stories exist in part to assuage the discomfort of uncertainty
or existential angst, and stop any further inquiry by defining the
fundamental mystery of existence in absolute terms. It is no
different from saying that the way things are is God's will.
Haha, if you see my last response to Stathis, you will see that my
story offers no comfort nor discomfort - it is pure science which
merely accounts for the actual universe as it is rather than what
our mechanistic or animistic compulsions tell us it cannot be. The
only advantage that my view offers is that it reveals consciousness
as it actually is.
Pure science would give you a means to test your ideas. You are
simply philosophizing about metaphysics. Your view reveals nothing.
It tells a story. It is up to the listener to decide whether they
want to place their faith in the story you tell, because you provide
no arguments that can be tested in any empirical way.
If that's true, it is only because experience is not empirical. I
keep making this point but nobody seems to comprehend it at all.
Science is about understanding whatever phenomena can be understood.
Whether you denigrate it as 'simply' this or 'metaphysical' that
doesn't make the alternative non-explanations of legacy science any
more plausible. It's not a matter of having faith in a story, it is
a matter of seeing for yourself whether it makes more sense than all
other explanations - and I submit that thus far is seems to do that.
Further, nothing that anyone on this list has said gives me any
confidence that they really understand the basic premises that I
propose, since the counterarguments offered are invariably old hat
and obvious to me.
Of course experience is empirical. Drugs affect peoples' experience
in predictable ways - if they didn't, people probably wouldn't take
them (as much). Theories about experience can be used to make claims
that can be tested. There are theories of experience or
consciousness that would conclude lucid dreaming is possible, and
others that would conclude it is impossible. Turns out that any
theory that says it's impossible must be thrown out, since lucid
dreaming is accepted as a real phenomenon... I've even done it once
or twice.
According to your definition of science above, religion is
scientific. Religions explain and confer understanding about
reality. Religious worldviews can't be tested, of course, but let's
not let that detail undermine their status as science.
(Pseudo)-Religion use authoritative (non scientific) argument since
theology has been thrown out of the academy, in 523 after C.
But this has made the Aristotelian conception of the world into an
implicit religion, and a part of science is unaware of this, making
the whole mind-body problem a taboo in science, because it reveals
that science is still pseudo-religious on the fundamental issues.
If you want people to take your ideas seriously you need to do the
work of finding ways to legitimize them using the scientific method.
Even if just in principle. Even if you said something like "we don't
yet have the technology to do this, but in a hundred years we could
test my theory by ..."
Craig vindicates not using the scientific method. Like many
philosophers he defends some truth, which an honest scientist will
never do. In science we propose theories (= hypothesis), and possible
test.
Fortunately other people do have a better idea about what I am
talking about..
You might be better off spending more time with them. Honestly, why
are you still here? I give you points for persistence, that's for
sure. I would think at some point you cut bait. How many times do we
need to see the same arguments repeated? How long you gonna dangle
that worm?
Pseudo-science and pseudo-religion use the method "What I tell you
three times is true" (Lewis Carroll). That works very well. Think
about those who still believe that drug should be illegal.
Bruno
Terren
Craig
Terren
Craig
Terren
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Stathis Papaioannou
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