On 01 Oct 2013, at 18:46, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, October 1, 2013 7:13:17 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 30 Sep 2013, at 14:05, Telmo Menezes wrote <to Craig>:
The comp assumption that computations have
qualia hidden inside them is not much of an answer either in my
view.
I have the same problem.
The solution is in the fact that all machines have that problem.
More exactly: all persons capable of surviving a digital
substitution must have that and similar problems. It is a sort of
meta-solution explaining that we are indeed confronted to something
which is simply totally unexplainable.
Note also that the expression "computation have qualia" can be
misleading. A computation has no qualia, strictly speaking. Only a
person supported by an infinity of computation can be said to have
qualia, or to live qualia. Then the math of self-reference can be
used to explain why the qualia have to escape the pure third person
type of explanations.
A good exercise consists in trying to think about what could like an
explanation of what a qualia is. Even without comp, that will seem
impossible, and that explains why some people, like Craig, estimate
that we have to take them as primitive. here comp explains, why
there are things like qualia, which can emerge only in the frist
person points of view, and admit irreductible components.
Explaining why X is local to a certain perspective, or why X is
irreducible does not explain why X is an aesthetic presence though.
Good. This means comp gives job. Nobody pretends that comp solves
everything at once, and on the contrary, I specifically explains that
he leads to new problem, like explaining the laws of physics from a
statistic on computation-seen-from inside (to be short).
You can have numerical expressions which are irreducible and local
to a machine without there being any such thing as flavor or color.
As long as we are saying that both qualia and quanta are real, I
don't see any advantage of making qualia supervene on quanta instead
of the other way around, especially when we can understand that the
nature of counting is to create figurative reductions which are
nameless and homeless.
It is easier to explain something immaterial from something
immaterial, than to explain something immaterial from primary matter,
which is a quite speculative notion (nobody has ever provided any
evidence for it, except a niave extrapolation from our familiarity
with the neighborhood).
We can't turn a wavelength into a color without color vision and
real illumination,
No doubt.
but we can turn color into a wavelength simply by discarding all of
the actual color experience and looking at general patterns within
optics analytically (abstractly).
Sure. Goethe said this already, but was wrong in deducing from this
that Newton theory of color was wrong. It was just not handling the
qualia aspect.
The irreducibility and 1p locality are hints, but they are neither
necessary nor sufficient to access any specific qualia.
This is what you should justify.
I really don't think that I am missing something here. I can easily
see it the other way around, I just don't think that it is true of
the universe that we live in. Yes, it makes sense why a machine
would not be able to tell that its experience is the result of a
machine, but it doesn't make sense that Santa Claus would make that
experience into tongues that taste that are different from eyes that
see. All that matters is information transfer, so that difference
would not engender any qualia, just clever addressing.
The modal intensional variant of the self-reference is not related to
addressing. Even G ([]p) is not, or quite indirectly with some
imagination, but the subject (S4Grz, []p & p)) blows up any addressing
and naming issues in this context. No machines, like us, can give a
description of "who they are".
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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