On Sunday, February 16, 2014 7:12:33 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > On 2/16/2014 11:34 AM, David Nyman wrote: > > On 16 February 2014 17:42, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net <javascript:>>wrote: > > I don't disagree, but I think this formulation leaves "meaning" as >> mysterious and one may ask why consciousness creates meaning. I think >> meaning comes from being able to act in the world to realize values. And >> it doesn't require consciousness, at least not human like consciousness. >> The Mars Rover acts to fulfill a mission plan and so rocks and hills have >> meaning for it. > > > Unfortunately this seems to me to beg the questions it seeks to answer. > The Mars Rover certainly acts in a manner consistent with rocks and hills > having meaning for it (based on our empathic identification with its > situation) but its behaviour can equally be attributed to physics alone (as > indeed can ours, under the same physicalist assumptions). But I agree that > meaning is related to value and hence cries out for an explanation of value > that resists elimination by reduction to an account in purely physical > terms. > > > I don't think so. We know where the values of the Mars Rover are encoded > and how they affect its behavior and we know how we could change them. > That's about as good as reductionism gets. > > This requirement probably implies some necessary relation between > meaning and consciousness, or at least self-reference. > > > There's a relation. The Mars rover must know where it is and its internal > status (the first level of consciousness) in order to pursue its values. > If it can form second order, instrumental values in arbitrarily deep > hierarchies then I would say it has reflexive consciousness, i.e. it's > self-aware. >
I don't think it needs to know where it is at all. No more than the beads of an abacus know where they are, or a net knows how big the fish are. As long as the designers of the Rover can relate the data from the rover to real places, it is hard for them to remember that this relation is their own rather than the Rover's. Craig > > Brent > > It may be that the ramifications of computational reference may > ultimately lead to such an explanation, but that is beyond my competence to > assess. Right now I don't have any other suggestions. > > David > -- > 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 everything-li...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com<javascript:> > . > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
