On 03 Feb 2014, at 09:24, meekerdb wrote:
On 2/3/2014 12:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 02 Feb 2014, at 20:31, meekerdb wrote:
On 2/2/2014 5:37 AM, David Nyman wrote:
Craig, nothing you have said so far diminishes by a single iota
the significance of the paradox to your theory. It's not so easy
to disarm it as insouciantly interpolating armfuls of non-
sequiturs couched in an impenetrable private jargon. You quote
Chalmers, but you consistently dodge (or perhaps don't really
get) the point he is making. His analysis isn't merely that
physics seems to make consciousness causally irrelevant, though
that in itself would be daunting enough. The paradoxical
entailment comes from confronting the stark realisation that,
despite this, physically-instantiated bodies and brains (i.e. the
appearances in terms of which we interact both with "ourselves"
and with each other) continue to behave *as if* they were laying
claim to such conscious phenomena. Furthermore, they apparently
do so by means of a causally-closed mechanism that entails that
they neither possess these phenomena nor could plausibly have any
access to them.
But the "apparently" in the above is not apparent at all. One
could just as well conclude that consciousness is a nomologically
necessary aspect of the causally-close physics; that it's no more
separable than is temperature from molecular motion.
That analogy is limited. You can explain temperature from molecules
cinetics by remaining entirely in the 3p account. The mind-body
problem is that if you can explain the whole 3p of the 1p, then the
mind seems having no role at all.
Which is analogous. You could explain the cooling of your coffee
entirely in terms of molecular motion without mentioning
temperature. But you would not have eliminated temperature.
Because it is an unavoidable reality, that we can test and verify. But
consciousness of others cannot be verified.
That is why you do indeed seems to believe that consciousness could go
away like the "élan vital" or the phlogiston, but typically, you do
not say that for temperature!
Now with comp we take the mind seriously and can explain its
necessity and role (like with the hypostases), but we lost any
ontic place for matter, so we lost primitive physics, and we have
to recover it by a statistics on the 1p brought by all computations.
It is not a problem (except for Aristotelian fundamentalists)
because nobody has ever provided evidences for primitive matter or
physicalism. It is only a big assumption in metaphysics.
I'd say it is a very small assumption. Matter is assumed, but
nothing about it is assumed except that it is independent of us and
we can agree on it.
It is not independent of "us" (when us = the universal machines, or
the Löbian one).
Primitive matter is not a small assumption. It is in contradiction
with computationalism, and the occam abandon of epinoumena (like
invisible horses, élan vitale).
It's like your idea of god: it's just a place holder name for
whatever physicist will use as fundamental in their explanation. We
could call it goar.
It is a place holder name for the transcendental reality responsible
for our existence, and that we can search.
To say that it is a a place holder name for whatever physicist will
use as fundamental in their explanation is to adopt the Aristotelian
Matter God-or-Goar. It is already a choice of a religion, at a place
where we just show that such a religion contradicts another one:
computationalism.
So your Goar is already certainly not a God compatible with comp. We
can use a simpler one, the arithmetical true relations existing among
natural numbers.
Bruno
Brent
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