On 2/3/2014 1:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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!
But I don't believe that. I think that consciousness is a necessary aspect of
intelligence, and that is functionally observable.
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).
?? So now 1+1=2 is *not* independent of us?
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.
You again falsely assume that physicist have already ruled out some immaterial as being
goar - in spite of the fact that it is physicists who are promoting mathematicalism. It's
as though you have denominated physicists as the bad guys in a morality play about the
evils of materialism.
Brent
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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