On 2/3/2014 2:29 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 3 February 2014 21:25, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 4 February 2014 02:26, David Nyman <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> On 3 February 2014 12:06, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>> If consciousness is epiphenomenal I don't see how that diminishes its
>> importance in any way, let alone eliminates it. It is consistent with
>> evolution since it is not an optional extra: if intelligence evolved
>> then consciousness had to evolve as a necessary side-effect. It is
>> also consistent with the world being causally closed and eliminates
>> the paradox that David Nyman sees.
>
>
> Does it? You still haven't explained why bodies emit utterances that
appear
> to refer to this putative epiphenomenon. Or are you saying that they're
not
> really emitting such utterances or making such references? They're just
> physical systems going about their lawful physical business, but somehow
> that evokes a physically-undetectable extra something-or-other. And it's
> only in terms of this extra something-or-other that utterances seem to
exist
> that, in turn, only seem so to refer. Is that what it boils down to?
It's because you're stuck on the idea that consciousness is something
extra and optional.
Those weren't rhetorical questions. I was asking you for your views. I don't think I'm
stuck on any idea in particular. I'm more interested in trying to discern precisely what
is entailed by framing a problem in a particular way.
If you could see that it was logically entailed by
certain physical phenomena or computations you wouldn't have a
problem.
How right you are. Do you see this? If you do, perhaps you could explain to me how it is
so entailed.
It would be like agonising over why an object in which every
point on its perimeter is equidistant from the centre has the quality
of roundness rather than squareness or nothingness; and how it could
be that roundness has no separate causal efficacy over and above what
can be explained in terms of the physicality of the object possessing
this property.
Yes, that would certainly follow if all the relevant phenomena could be exhaustively
explained by the correct level of physical emergence. Do you presently have a view as to
what that might be, or is this a case of "shut up and wait"?
> By the way, I'm not really sure what the term epiphenomenon is supposed to
> convey in this context. Is it indeed supposed to be a sort of one-way
> dualism in which, as I suggest above, a genuinely novel something-or-other
> is evoked by physical behaviour but cannot reciprocally affect it (and so
> cannot be detectable by it). Or is it really a form of cryptic
eliminativism
> in which, in the final analysis, there is no additional something-or-other
> at all?
I don't think these terms make any substantive difference. Whether my
consciousness can be replicated by a computer, for example, is an
important question and it is not dependent on whether under some use
of the English language it is correct to say that consciousness can be
eliminated.
Absolutely. If indeed my consciousness had been satisfactorily replicated by a
computational prosthetic it would be very foolish of me to complain that it had been
eliminated.
Anyway, it would appear, that like Brent, you were using the term epiphenomenon to mean
some emergent phenomenon that is fully entailed by canonical physical causation, like
temperature. If that's the case, I agree with Brent that there would be no remaining
motive to differentiate it categorically from any other such canonical phenomenon of
emergence.
By the way, if you think that consciousness may be that kind of phenomenon, does that
imply that you reject any categorical 3p/1p distinction? I ask because I tend to agree
with Bruno (and Brent, if I've understood his most recent comment) that the prize at the
end of this road is a completed theory of the physical correlates of self-reported
conscious phenomena. But many people take the view that after this prize is attained,
there is still a "remainder problem" that doesn't seem so problematical with temperature
or other emergent phenomena of the canonical kind. On the other hand, if one wishes to
deny that anything remains to be accounted for after the physical correlates are
explained it would be reasonable to describe one's position as eliminative with respect
to any such remainder.
Bruno thinks that even if we explain consciousness at this kind of engineering level,
there is a remainder - namely explaining the origin of the physics we used to explain
consciousness. And he proposes that both can be explained as emergent phenomena within
arithmetic by some kind of interaction of all possible computations. I'm open to such a
possibility, but I don't hold out much hope for the program succeeding - at least not
until physics gets a lot simpler. I think that when we can "build a general AI to
specification" that will be the end of the "hard problem" of consciousness.
Sometimes a problem hangs around a long time because people have a prejudice that the
answer must take a certain form. People thought about gravity in terms of "What is it
about things that makes some of them want to go down and others go up?" They thought of
heat as being a fluid and tried to study it's properties. Later, when a good theory has
been developed, they often overlook the fact that the new theory *did not* answer the old
questions. It was *not* the explanation the had sought. But it was better and it created
new questions.
Brent
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make
models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain
verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a
mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
-----John von Neumann
--
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.
