My B in law posited, what moves the cursor, using a pc as an analogy of mind? Of course the cursor can be programmed to move and act, by a program, but then who made the programmer? Leibniz and other thinkers may have asked, who made God? Terrific question. My sense of things is the use of an old fashioned or a new fashioned map. One is paper and you use your eyes and fingers, another map is you punch in the destination, and a women's voice speaks "Turn right in 5 miles! Both are maps. Similarly asking who created God is akin to asking your maps, "where is the next alien intelligent civilization in the Galaxy?" Our little maps cannot tell us, because we're "out of range." Having said this, where are the space aliens, or where is God, may not be detectable on our maps, simply because we haven't explored the universe sufficiently.
Physicist, Freeman Dyson, has written that to know more things we have to have increasingly better observation, and to do this, we have to have improved tools for better experimentation and observation. The Self may be detectable or comprehendible through better tools, and one of these tools is assuredly mathematics. Mitch -----Original Message----- From: Roger Clough <[email protected]> To: - Roger Clough <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, Aug 26, 2013 3:31 am Subject: Leibniz's final causation as the Self, the active agent of change Leibniz's final causation as the Self, the active agent of change So far, materialistic models of the mind, such as Dennett's, are essentially passive. There is no internal active agent of change, which one might call the Self. The internal active agent of change is desire, which we might define as a mismatch between the current state and a goal. In other words, the internal active agent of change is final causation, which has been discussed by Leibniz as typical of life, and also by Aristotle in his four basic causes of change. This desire to achieve a personal goal appears mentally as an intention, which is the active agent of change. This is what we call the Self, and is the missing element of AI as well as current models of the mind. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough -- 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
