On 5 February 2014 23:32, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 05 Feb 2014, at 07:54, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>> To be clear, what I find problematic is the question of whether >> consciousness can cause someone to refer to it. > > > That is a good question. (I will answer it positively). > > > > >> It can't do this by >> definition if it's epiphenomenal. > > > OK. That will be the reason why I want to discard "epiphenomenalism". > > > > > >> However, you can declare that you >> are conscious and while the declaration is explainable in purely >> physical terms, it may be associated with actual consciousness. >> Perhaps this is nitpicking. > > > It is not nitpicking, as eventually this is the crux of the matter. > > See below. > > > > > > >> >> >> I don't believe that mind can act on anything except in a manner of >> speaking, but again maybe this is nitpicking. The important thing is >> that if mind had separate causal efficacy we would observe miraculous >> events in the brain, and we don't observe such events. >> >> Even with comp in the absence of a basic physical reality, you could >> say there is no *reason* why subjectivity should exist - it just does. > > > Let us imagine that you do tell us that "you are conscious". > > Now, I look at myself, and I know what "I am conscious" means, in some > direct intuition, and so, I will suppose that you saying refer to that fact, > which I understand: you are indeed conscious. > > But then you add that your consciousness has no role at all in your > utterance of "I am conscious". This seems to me like saying "I am > conscious", but my utterance of it is the one of my body-zombie, who by some > kind of mysterious chance happens to say a truth about me, given that you > don't causally associate your first person observation of your consciousness > with the utterance. Well, I *could* be a zombie and still say that, unless you consider the idea of zombies contradictory (which maybe it is). > You could say "I have headache", which is a first person experience, and, > for that reason I will take an aspirin, yet the existence of that first > person headache is not used by my brain to make me taking the aspirin. That > seems close to non-sense to me. It prevents you to be a zombie, but makes > you deluded in all high level person behavior. A zombie would take an aspirin as well, wouldn't it? Otherwise its zombie deception would be obvious. > In fact, we don't even need to talk on consciousness. I think it makes sense > to say that a program can have a high level causal efficacy, even when the > behavior does not violate the laws of physics or arithmetic which supports > that high level efficacy. > > For example, nobody will say that Deep Blue win the chess tournament, > because this NAND receives this inputs and then (followed by a lengthy > description of all the low level happenings). > > We will explain deep blue behavior in terms of most of its high level > ability. We will say "he lost that game because he did not recognize that > his opponents has made a Nimzovitch entry", or "he win that game because it > tested more possibilities than the opponents". > > That will be the real (or more genuine) explanation, both for the computer > scientists who programmed deep blue, and for the chess players. Indeed the > use of the NAND gates are somehow entirely irrelevant, we could have > programmed deep blue on another type of machine. > > As complex entities, we need to have higher level description and > explanation, and are necessarily ignorant of our lower levels, which might > only be the support of our explanation, and is different from the more > genuine high level explanation. > > In that way, we can recover the sense of "I take an aspirin because I have a > persistent headache since the morning". > > God might know that your body takes an aspirin because it obeys to SWE > equation, but the SWE is only a context in which a person with a first > person headache experience can take an aspirin. It is not the cause or the > explanation of your behavior. You need to be God, to say that your > consciousness has no role, and from God's view, I can make sense, but > everything get wrong, hereby, simply because we are not in that God > position. > > OK? I don't really disagree with any of that, but I would still say that chess program makes moves due to the activity of electrons in semiconductors, not because it is exercising a particular strategy except in a manner of speaking. But the substantive point I want to make is that there is no downward causation, for if there were we would observe magical events. If you accept that then I agree with you, any apparent disagreement is really just semantics. I don't think Craig accepts that: he agrees that there are no magical events in the brain but, inconsistently, he also believes that the brain exhibits behaviour not entirely explained by the physics. > I am not sure if I succeed to be as clear as I would like. I do think that > you make a confusion between G* and S4Grz. > > G* knows that []p = []p & p (so it knows that the body-zombie has a soul, or > that the soul has a body-zombie), > But G, which represent the machine cannot know that. This prevents the > machine to identify its soul, with the body, and it is only by betting on > comp, and praying God, that the soul of the machine can bet on some level of > identification, which remains unknown by the machine. > > I hope we will clarify this, with and without the modal logic. > Epiphenomenalism might be correct in some God' eyes, but may be "really > false" in the machine first person eye. Bringing back that > Heaven-epiphenomenalism on Earth would be like knowing our subst level, or > knowing the basic level, or like defending a murderer by saying it has no > free will and just obeyed the SWE. That might be only "trivially" true at > some level, and deeply false at the level where we actually live. > > Case not closed! -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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]. 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