On 03 Feb 2014, at 21:53, meekerdb wrote:
On 2/3/2014 12:11 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 3 February 2014 19:18, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
My view is that it is not physically undetectable. We just don't
know how to detect it yet. In Bruno's theory a computer whose
program is Lobian is conscious. How would we detect that? By
querying the computer. By studying it's program. Will we
experience its consciousness...No. But we don't measure the
chaotic molecular motions we call temperature either, we infer it
from other measurements using a theoretical model to relate the two.
Well, I was just trying out some possible characterisations of
"epiphenomenon" here. But I don't think your're talking about quite
the same thing are you? Perhaps you mean that we may discover/
develop some tractable level of explanation, deriving ultimately
from canonical physical causation, that is 100% co-related with the
phenomena of consciousness and hence explains exactly what's going
on when some physical system makes claims about its states of
consciousness. Is that what you mean by physically detectable, more
or less?
Yes.
Would this correspond to an epiphenomenon in your book?
Yes, although as Bruno noted "epiphenomenon" is not a very well
defined concept. I'd have no problem with saying temperature and
consciousness are phenomena.
Me too. But they are still very different. Temperature is a 3p
phenomenon, emerging from 3p phenomena. It is like a molecules or a
cells, who behavior can be explained through the behavior of its
components (indeed that is the basic reason we can believe in comp).
But consciousness is an 1p phenomenon, and materialism has an
insuperable problem with it. Not comp, but we lost the explanative
power of the primitive matter notion, and have to justify iits
appearance from the comp theory of consciousness, self-reference, etc.
Nobody would say that life and temperature are epiphenomena, but many
materialists (and sometime computationalists) want consciousness (and
any 1p notion) to be epiphenomenal.
With comp both consciousness and matter are arithmetical phenomena
seen "from inside".
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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