On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 4:54:13 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 04 Feb 2014, at 18:20, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > > On Tuesday, February 4, 2014 11:54:26 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> >> On 04 Feb 2014, at 12:46, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >> >> > On 4 February 2014 22:32, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: >> > >> >>> My view is that if consciousness is epiphenomenal it's meaningless >> >>> to >> >>> ask why bodies emit utterances referring to the epiphenomenon. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> Why? You agree that there is still one way causal link. That is >> >> consciousness is a necessary side, and real, effect of the brain >> >> activity. >> >> So why a body could not refer to it meaningfully? >> > >> > It's not that which would be meaningless: it would be meaningless to >> > ask how a body could refer to an epiphenomenon, David's initial >> > question. >> >> Not sure if a body can refer to anything (but we can say that, as an >> abuse of language to be short). >> >> The question, it seems to me, remains: why a person (using her body) >> could not refer to an epiphenomenon? >> Why would that be meaningless? Why asking those question would be >> meaningless? >> >> If I tell you "I feel myself conscious right now"? Is that meaningless? >> It is meaningless that I hope you find that plausible? >> >> And is it meaningless to ask such question? >> >> May be, that's possible, but I need some justification. Without it, it >> looks just like "don't try to understand, don't search, don't ask". >> >> I do think that the modal logic will provide a *very* powerful tool to >> see many nuances and possibilities in this context. >> >> >> >> > >> >> Ah, but then it looks like if there is a two way road, and >> >> consciousness is >> >> only a phenomenon. A quite peculiar one, as it relates 3p and 1p, >> >> but still >> >> a phenomenon, and it this leads to make physics also a 1p >> >> phenomenon, why >> >> not? >> >> >> >> Why do you think we gain by making consciousness into an >> >> epiphenomenon? >> > >> > We don't have to explain why it apparently has no effect on matter yet >> > we can still refer to it. >> >> May be we cannot [explain why it apparently has no effect on matter >> yet we can still refer to it]. >> >> But if that is the case, the question remains: why? And here, comp, >> and the arithmetization of metarithmetic, can explain, for similar >> questions, why we cannot explain some truth. >> >> I think we can't decide that something does not need to be explained, >> above the more elementary assumptions. >> > > I think we must explain the elementary assumptions also, > > > Of course. But unless we want do philosophical obfuscation, there is also > a need of some good-willingness in accepting sharing some elementary belief. >
Why would I share an elementary belief that I understand to be false? > > So my question is what does need to be explained in the axioms of > arithmetic that I have given? For most people a first order logic axiom like > > 0 ≠ s(x) (for all x) is simpler to understand that any statement > involving terms like "sense" or "aesthetic". > It's not simpler for me, or someone who doesn't know the language of mathematical notation. I have to figure out what is meant by s(x), which distracts me from the question of whether s(x) is actually fictional and derived from a whole history of philosophical formulation. Once you know how to read the language, the sense making that it took to get there, such as all of the childhood wiring of tactile and visual metaphors crafted by patient teachers, are elided into the sub-personal awareness. With the bulk of the iceberg of sense making metaphor safely under water, yes the tip seems much simpler than talking about something for which a formal language has yet to exist. > > The axiom here says 0 is not a successor of any natural number. A FAQ is > "is not 0 the successor of -1 ?", and the anwer is that we just accept "0 ≠ > s(x)" to eliminate the negative numbers, in which we are not interested > because we want a very simple Turing universal base. We could use all > integers, as they are also Turing universal with addition and > multiplication, but we have chosen the natural numbers. > Beyond that type of explanation, at this stage, asking for more is > obfuscation. > It would be obfuscation if we were asking about computation or math, but I'm only interested in the relationship of consciousness to physics and information. > > > > and then we find that sense can only be self-explanatory. Nothing else can > be self explanatory because explanation itself can't be anything other than > a way of making sense. > > >> I think that is Craig's fuel, and no comp fuel, to take sense has >> fundamental. Epiphenomenalism has also that air of "let us not try to >> understand". >> > > I think that if you aren't seeing that sense is fundamental, it is because > you have stopped questioning it when you get to a comfortable level of > objective-seeming simplicity. > > > Sense is without doubt fundamental, and is indeed the base of the UDA > (with sense/consciousness assumed to be invariant for the digital > transplant). Then the math of comp makes it possible to pursue the > interrogation, not avoid it. > If you are agreeing that sense is fundamental then are you agreeing that arithmetic truth is derived from sense? In comp terms, the reason that I disallow the digital transplant is that I suspect that the capacity for sensory enrichment is nested-logarithmic, and that there are thresholds in which that logarithm diagonalizes, if that makes sense. A biological organism, lets say a frog, represents a particular history of sensory experience. If we assume fundamental sense, then the forgetting that we experience in our momentary consciousness, and the loss of history in death, is not fundamental. It is retained on the Absolute level, so that what is expressed to us by the frog's living body (hopping, croaking, etc, not just anatomically amphibian, but personality, character, metaphor) is not only a what but also a who that recapitulates the entire history of the individual frog, all frogs, amphibians, living organisms, etc. The frog image that we are aesthetically acquainted with is the very tip of a tall spire of history that our public facing senses render as collapsed into an externalized presence. We can do this because both we and the frog, at the bottom of our spires, share the same base of common sense. The problem with digital substitution is that it just takes the collapsed rendering and simulates it in our experience, so that the spire of history which connects it to our experience and the Totality of experience is missing entirely, replaced by an impersonal set of modal strategies to navigate the un-inspired, flat terrain which fills the space between spires. > > I'm seeing simplicity itself as a concept - a quality which is revealed > not by some mechanism, but by sanity itself - a sanity shared by all > phenomena without having to be taught or practiced like arithmetic. > > > Yes, shared by all phenomena including the arithmetical one. Why not? > Because the arithmetical one is a synthetic summary of externalized sense. Perhaps *The* external summary. > Fuzzy philosophy can be ok. Some people non well trained in science can > have insight, and sometimes even see what the experts can no more see, by > having their nose to close the subject matter. > But using fuzzy philosophy to make peremptory negative statement, notably > on the presence/absence of consciousness for some type of being, makes me > feel uneasy, especially when you don't try to answer the arguments > presented. I can't help myself to not think you do have prejudices on > numbers and machines. > If I have prejudices against numbers and machines it is only because I see that saying yes to the doctor is a catastrophe that few understand how to avoid and why it should be avoided. By this I mean it metaphorically that I see myself as part of a very threatened civilization which is on the verge of turning into a computer controlled prison. I see us as in the depths of the Dark Ages as far as consciousness is concerned, fiddling in the Neo-Scholastic echo-chambers of quanta while the forest of qualia burns. Had I been alive in Galileo's time, I would have seen just the opposite, and advanced the idea of verificationism and measurement to halt the tide of superstition and chaos. Craig > > Bruno > > > > > Craig > > >> >> You confirm my feeling that "epiphenomenalism" is used by admitting or >> introducing a bet on an explanation gap. Some explanation gap is there >> indeed, but I think we can entirely explain it. This leads to a sort >> of miracle: consciousness has a role, even in the physical events. >> Mind can "act" on matter. (cf atomic bombs and computers), and this >> without violating the physical laws. But eventually it makes the >> physical laws emerging on something non physical (which comp allows to >> limit on arithmetical truth or combinators truth, ...). >> >> Bruno >> >> >> >> >> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ >> >> >> >> > -- > 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] <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]<javascript:> > . > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- 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]. 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