On Sunday, February 9, 2014 8:23:21 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 09 Feb 2014, at 12:35, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > > On Sunday, February 9, 2014 5:39:58 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> >> On 09 Feb 2014, at 05:25, Craig Weinberg wrote: >> >> How do you know that you are really reading these words? >> >> >> The question is ambiguous. If "really reading these words" refer to the >> quale of reading those words, then I agree I can know that. But if it means >> that there is a some 3p "real reality" in which I read those "real 3p >> words", then I cannot know that, as I might be dreaming. >> >> >> >> People misread things all the time. Maybe it just feels like you are >> reading them? You could be having a brain aneurism. Logically, there is no >> way to prove that you are reading these words right now. >> >> >> OK. >> >> >> >> The fact that you might not really be reading these words correctly (if >> at all) might be offensive to the real words. To avoid passing judgment on >> those other words, we must assume that it is no more likely that we are >> reading these words as it is that we are not. >> >> >> This I do not understand. We don't need to be sure to act. Our belief can >> be true, even when we can't be sure. We can develop some trust in reality >> and our means to evaluate plausibilities. >> >> I cannot know that I am awake, and that I will send you this mail, but I >> can be pretty sure. >> > > What is the logical proof that our belief can be true though? > > > That does not exist. > > We just cannot know that our beliefs are true. We can hope, but that's > all. Only the insane people can "know" that they are sane. The sane people > cannot get rid of some doubt. >
I'm not so interested in whether our beliefs *are* true, but in the fact that logic cannot even conceive that beliefs could be true. The whole notion that there can be a belief, a truth, a relation, and a relation which relates the two is beneath all forms of logic or arithmetic. It's an expectation within sense. > > > > > > >> >> >> >> >> What is the logical way out of this? >> >> >> We can hope, pray, bet, that reality is kind enough to make us wrong when >> we are wrong, and hope to progress toward a big picture we can also hope >> for. >> >> If you start to have public certainties, you are doomed. We can start by >> agreeing on assumptions, only. That is science or good philosophy. I think. >> > > Aren't all agreements and assumptions in science or good philosophy > expectations of public certainties (even the prohibition of public > certainty)? > > > Yes, but we can't know that, > Then by the same logic, we can't know that we can't know that either. We can't begin with a logic of disbelief, because that supervenes on the expectation that we can trust our ability to believe in disbelief in the first place. > and that if why we make the assumption explicit, even the "obvious one", > like the fact that if A is true, and if A -> B is true, then B is true. > Making the assumption explicit may have unexpected effects though. Confining and defining sense so that it is generic and repeatable may strip out the intrinsic flexibility of all concepts and expressions. That figurative promiscuity which is amputated by explicit definition may accumulate until it becomes overwhelming when it comes to consideration of sense/awareness itself. > > > > That's why I like sense. It doesn't have to be a final truth, > > > Well, I have less problem with sense being the final truth, than with > sense being the starting assumption in the possibly final TOE. > I don't think there is any other way to have a final TOE that is open ended enough to be true. > > > > but neither does it have to be an arbitrary fiction that only seems to > coincide with the truth. > > > It cannot be. In the AUDA theory, sense and consciousness cannot be > fiction, and have (by definition) to coincide with truth, but of course, > that is what will make them non 3p-justifiable. > How then do you get sense which corresponds veridically to 3p? > > > Sense can appreciate itself directly, without having to define and encode. > > > > And that's enough for the practical 1p-life. The apes do not need a theory > of respiration to be able to respire, and nobody needs to understand the > functioning of a brain to use it, or the origin of consciousness, to be > conscious. But this does not mean that a theory explaining consciousness > without assuming it, is *necessarily* false, like you seem to imply very > often. > The problem though is we posit something other than sense as the generator of consciousness, then we have a mechanism which has no possibility of appreciating itself - no *sense* of participation, and no *sense* of aesthetic acquaintance. Even if we accept this implausible scenario of a completely numb, invisible, intangible, unconscious, silent void hosting a UD's non-output output, the scenario that follows, where at some arbitrary point non-unconsciousness is invented, is even more implausible. Why would a machine that can make consciousness without being conscious itself have any use for it? > And then we need local encoding to communicate some sense to others, and > that's why brain are handy to do exactly that. I hope you agree that brain > does some (at least) encodings. > Sure, the brain does encoding, although a lot of it may not have have as much to do with our personal awareness as we assume. What we are looking at as activities within neurons and molecules may be more about encoding from the inside out, as a single trans-temporal human experience is distributed across trillions of semi-redundant locations over trillions of nested, scale-calibrated moments. Craig > Bruno > > > > > Craig > > > >> Bruno >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> 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. >> >> >> 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. 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