On 28 January 2014 18:25, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
That's because the theory prevents the truth about it from being accessed. > The theory of comp is blind to its blindness, and demands to be refuted > only by those wearing blindfolds. To test fairly, you would have to take > off the blindfold, but then the fact of your seeing would make the test > redundant. Hi Craig Your use of the word "blindness" above prompts me to ask you a question that has long puzzled me about your ideas. What I don't understand is why the sense you posit as fundamental in your theory would not, in effect, be "blind" to itself. If I've understood you (which isn't necessarily the case, of course) sense is the "inner dual" of outer activity (or vice versa) - so that the complete picture is a sort of intrinsic/extrinsic duality. If that is the case, your ideas seem to bear a strong relation to panpsychist or panexperientialist theories. These latter theories do not, in general, dispute that extrinsic activity per se is fully explainable in its own terms (is reducible, for example, to the entities and processes described by physics) Rather, they additionally posit a basic sensory component accompanying these activities (i.e. an inner duality) that in some way summates, at the appropriate level, all the way up to conscious experience. The problem that concerns me about this way of looking at things is that any and all behaviour associated with consciousness - including, crucially, the articulation of our very thoughts and beliefs about conscious phenomena - can at least in principle be exhausted by an extrinsic account. But if this be so, it is very difficult indeed to understand how such extrinsic behaviours could possibly make reference to any "intrinsic" remainder, even were its existence granted. It isn't merely that any postulated remainder would be redundant in the explanation of such behaviour, but that it is hardly possible to see how an inner dual could even be accessible in principle to a complete (i.e. causally closed) extrinsic system of reference in the first place. It might seem at first that comp (which also exploits an outer/inner distinction) is vulnerable to a similar line of criticism, but I believe it can escape it - unlike primitive-physical or (subject to your comments) primitive-sensory explanations - by building on the fundamental elements of reference from the ground up (so to speak). Comp (which derives from the study of computation, not computers, as you seem to assume rather often in your critique) is built on recursive webs of reference (notably self-reference) which bootstrap beyond proof or ostensive demonstration to incontrovertible truth (at least the arithmetical variety). This puts us in the position (assuming the comp hypothesis) of accepting our own incommunicable ability to access such incorrigible indexical truths - in common with the arithmetical machines we study - or concluding (per impossibile) that we too are truthless "zombies". David -- 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.
