On 9/25/2013 4:40 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 25 September 2013 05:03, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:

We will have learned what emotions and feelings
are at the level of sensors and computation and action.  And when we have
done that 'the hard problem' will be seen to have been an idle question -
like "What is life." proved to be in the 20th century.
David Chalmers has a good riposte to this, I think. He points out
that, properly framed, the question "What is Life?" was always going to
be answerable in terms of lower-level elements and processes of
systems we regard as alive. Consequently, once these had been fully
elucidated (no matter how difficult this might turn out to be in
practice) we simply would have no motivation to look for further kinds
of explanation. There never really was any reason to anticipate there
being some "hard problem" of Life. OTOH, he argues, even if we
possessed a fully adequate account of the brain in terms of its
relevant physical elements and processes, the question of why any
fully adequate third-person characterisation might imply any further
first-person facts would still remain.

Of course the standard riposte to this riposte is indeed simply to
deny that there are "really" any such further first-person facts at
all (a position that Dennett has characterised as third person
absolutism).

I'd say the standard riposte is that the "first person facts" (qualia?) are just inherent in the 3p model. There is feeling that goes with certain kinds of information processing (e.g. creating a personal narrative). This is really implicit in Bruno's theory - that proving certain theorems in arithmetic necessarily entails qualia.

I wonder, however, whether this denial really makes any
sense in its own terms. After all, if one takes the reductive
enterprise as seriously as one ought, anything above the level of
fundamental constituents and their relations is understood as being
derivative or emergent. IOW, in a sense (and a strong sense for our
present purposes) such derivative levels are not independently "real".
It is easy to miss this point because of their explanatory
indispensability (e.g. Deutsch's example of the alternative histories
of the copper atom) but it is central to reductionism that such
emergent levels play no independent role in the fundamental machinery.
Nature, as we might say, seems to compute exclusively from the bottom
up.

"Nature" is our model of reality. We like to compute from "the bottom up" because it is usually easier to think of simpler things interacting to make more complicated things - but no always.


If the foregoing point is fully taken on board, it should be apparent
that our fundamental motivation for ascribing any truly independent
"reality" to derivative or emergent phenomena is actually their
appearance in some first-personal narrative.

But that's just taking 1p narratives as fundamental. The advantage of looking at a circle of 'reductions'

NUMBERS -> "MACHINE DREAMS" -> PHYSICAL -> HUMANS -> PHYSICS -> NUMBERS.

is that it cautions one against this kind fundamentalism. Shall we take perspectives as fundamental (Nietzsche), particles (Stenger), numbers (Bruno),... In my view they are all models and one 'reduces' to a level you can understand or manipulate, which will be different in different circumstances.

Brent


IOW, it makes no
difference to Nature, conceived reductively, whether we choose to
explain the current location of a copper atom in terms of nations and
wars, or the evolution of the wave-function of the universe, or the
structure of the Programmatic Library of Babel for that matter,
because the presumed-to-be-fundamental reality is understood to
subsist independently whatever the case. According to standard
reductionist principles, nations and wars - and indeed atoms and
molecules - are simply higher-order derivatives of more fundamental
entities and their relations. Indeed, more accurately, they simply
*are* those entities and their relations, without addition, in exactly
the sense that football teams or societies simply *are* human beings
in relation, without addition.

My point here is that these derivatives, in the end, are point-of-view
dependent. This is not to say, of course, that they are thereby simple
or arbitrary; quite the contrary. But there would be no need to appeal
to them at all were it not for the putative existence of
points-of-view in the first place. Nature, conceived purely as a
primary reality of fundamental entities and their relations, has no
truck with explaining the history of any particular copper atom in
terms of nations and wars or, for that matter, with distinguishing a
"copper atom" as worthy of explanation. Hence the primary
"first-person fact" that demands something beyond a strictly reductive
explanation is the peculiarly "non-derivative" status of a
point-of-view and the "emergent" entities in which it apparently
deals. That this may appear less than obvious to us is a consequence
of our seeming inability even to frame the question without assuming
the answer.

David


On 9/24/2013 8:44 PM, LizR wrote:

On 25 September 2013 15:41, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 9/24/2013 6:32 PM, LizR wrote:

On 25 September 2013 13:38, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au>
wrote:
This is also true of materialism. Whether you think this is a problem
or not depends on whether you think the "hard problem" is a problem or
not.

Indeed. I was about to say something similar (to the effect that it's hard
to imagine how "mere atoms" can have sights, sounds, smells etc either).


As a rule, if you want to explain X you need to start from something
without X.

Absolutely.

If you know of such an explanation, or even the outlines of one, I'd be
interested to hear it. As Russell said, this is the so-called "hard problem"
so any light (or sound, touch etc) on it would be welcome.


My 'solution' to the hard problem is to prognosticate that when we have
built intelligent robots we will have learned the significance of having an
internal narrative memory.  We will have learned what emotions and feelings
are at the level of sensors and computation and action.  And when we have
done that 'the hard problem' will be seen to have been an idle question -
like "What is life." proved to be in the 20th century.

Brent

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