On 1 February 2014 20:33, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Saturday, February 1, 2014 2:53:30 PM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: > >> On 1 February 2014 16:55, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> I get around that with perceptual relativity. When flying over a city, it >>> doesn't look like there are millions of conscious entities - not because >>> their behavior is limited to a set of rules, but because your vantage point >>> amplifies the insensitivity of your perceptual frame. By modulating >>> frequency and scale, perceptual histories diverge and alienate each other's >>> presence. The more extreme the alienation, the more the quality of what is >>> perceived appears mechanical. >> >> >> I don't see that you make your point here. How does "your vantage point >> amplifies the insensitivity of your perceptual frame" get around anything? >> > > Because it is not that consciousness follows rules, it is that rules are > the result of one conscious experience modeling others. What we can know > about the universe outside of our body is limited by our body. The mind has > different limitations, but it is much more directly sensitive to physics > than our body, and its view of other bodies. > Right, so the mind transcends the limits of the brain in its ability to make contact with physics? Is this supposed to mean that you are capable of thoughts that are not minutely correlated with some behaviour of your brain? If so, how do you explain how those thoughts acquire their "sensitivity to physics" or any purchase on the universe outside the body? > > >> ISTM rather that "the quality of what is perceived appears mechanical" >> because when placed under examination at any scale it can be observed to >> adhere to an unvarying and causally-closed set of rules (the ones we group >> under the heading of "physical"). >> > > That's because the variation is closed to our vantage point. If an alien > astronomer looked at any individual or group of people, they would conclude > a causally-closed set of rules as well, but that's only because they are > looking at the behavior of our bodies. The behavior of bodies is not that > interesting compared to the aesthetic content of experiences. You could > have a life changing epiphany and the alien astronomer would see nothing > very interesting. > But that, my dear Craig, is my very point, don't you see? Because amongst those "uninteresting" behaviours is the ability to lay claim to the possession of those very aesthetic experiences and those selfsame epiphanies. > > >> In effect, it appears to be a "mechanism" at all scales. >> > > Appears. What about feels? Why would mechanisms have an experience that > feels like something? > And there you have it! My point exactly - why indeed? But you would have been more correct to say "why would mechanisms *claim* to have an experience that feels like something". And, a fortiori, how? Don't look away - this is the POPJ. > >> The inexorable progress of this analysis of physical appearances has so >> far trumped every historical attempt to interpolate novel "top-down" rules >> operating at other levels (spiritualism, vitalism, holism, dualism etc.). >> > > Because it is looking for the head (temporary experiences) at the tail end > (bodies in space). They are aesthetically orthogonal views. If you measure > something with an instrument, you can only measure the outside of the > instrument interacting with the outside of another body. The result is an > inside out view of the universe. > True, but that inside-out view must be intelligibly correlated - and in astoundingly-precise detail at that - with the outside-in view. Else you are hard pressed to explain why they appear to co-vary in such exquisite detail. The emergence of the POPJ in both theories is a sign that neither a purely outside-in, nor a purely inside-out theory, can do the job of correlating consciousness with the appearance of mechanism. > >> Comp, as I've said, at the least confronts the problem and offers the >> possible shape of a solution (but that alone, of course, doesn't guarantee >> its correctness). >> > > Yes, Comp is almost correct, but at the absolute level, when it comes to > putting the horse of sense before the cart of information, it gets it > exactly wrong. > Only if you impose your particular prejudices on it by fiat. > > >> The value of any genuinely new insight (Relativity Theory, for example) >> is not in ignoring the previous theory (Newtonian mechanics in this case) >> but rather in providing a better explanation for the predictions of the old >> theory whilst simultaneously making new and surprising ones that turn out >> to match observation better. >> > > This is not about making predictions, although someone could take it in > that directions. This is about understanding the nature of consciousness > and physics. > Which as I've said must correlate the two whilst eliminating neither. > > >> Consequently, if your theory is to prevail, it must be able to explain >> why appearance - and especially the appearance of "conscious" behaviour, >> not excluding your own - conforms to "physical" causation as precisely as >> we observe. >> > > Because observation is a narrow constraint on sense which is invariably > reflected in the result of the observation. Why do the Blind Men each > conclude that the elephant is a different thing? You are underestimating > the depth of the pansensitivity that I'm proposing - which is what I have > come to expect. Turning your model of the universe inside out takes some > practice. When I say that sense is Absolutely Primordial, I mean that > nothing - not appearances, not realism, not sanity or logic - nothing > whatsoever is anything except a local feature within it. > I'm not surprised that you have come to expect incomprehension if the best you can do is complain that people "underestimate the depth" of your theory. It might help if you could actually point out what specifically is to be found in the hidden depths of pansensitivity that is an adequate response to the specific points I've been making. Poetry is not science and a metaphorical aside about Blind Men is not a reasoned argument. > >> This physical conformity of appearance is the reason that the theory >> cannot avoid the POPJ - in essence that we don't need, or seem even be able >> to apply, the notion of consciousness or sense to explain why the creatures >> that appear to us - including ourselves - make the claims to those >> phenomena that they do. What you say above doesn't suffice to address this >> formidable issue at all. >> > > It's not formidable if you bite the bullet and actually consider the sense > primitive without equivocating. Once you see that logic is a kind of sense > but sense is not a kind of logic, then everything falls into place nicely. > As long as you try to force the concrete presence of sensation and > sense-making into an abstract theory, the hard problem will always be > formidable. > I will be more than happy to see that sense is not a kind of logic if you can explain *with accompanying details* how this answers my arguments. I would also thank you to point out in exactly what points you think I've been equivocating. Trouble is, I fear you'll just say that since sense isn't a kind of logic there's no logical account that can be given of it. Well, I guess that means that those of us unwilling to pluck out the eyes of our reason will have to resign ourselves to remaining outside your state of grace in this regard. 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. > -- 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.
