On Monday, February 24, 2014 9:13:26 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: > > On 24 February 2014 02:43, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]<javascript:> > > wrote: > > How do you turn your desire to move your hand into the neurological >> changes which move them? The neurological change is the expression of what >> you actually are. These primitive levels of sense are beyond the question >> of 'how', they are more in the neighborhood of 'how else?' > > > But we cannot be content to let "how else?" stand as mere rhetoric, can we? >
Yes, in this case, we absolutely can. Otherwise you enter into a regress of having to ask 'how does asking how' work? We don't have to ask how it works, nor must there be an answer which could satisfy such an expectation. The whole idea of 'how' is a cognitive framing of sensible comparisons. Sure, it seems very important to the intellect, just as air seems very important to the lungs, but that doesn't mean that 'how' can refer to anything primordial. It's like asking an actor in a movie asking how they got into a projection on a screen. > The question of how the desire moves the hand is essentially the same > question I have been asking you all along to try to justify in terms of a > theory of primitive sensory-motive relations. How specifically might > experience translate to function? > It doesn't. It's a matter of the frame of reference. My experience looks like a function from your distance. From a greater, absolute distance, both of our functions looks like mathematics. > Certainly it is the expression of what you actually are, but how can this > be cashed out in detail, or even in principle? You may feel that it is > unfair of me to make this demand at such an early stage because it is > precisely the unsolved conundrum of any theory that doesn't fundamentally > sweep consciousness under the rug. > No, no, it's not unfair at all. I'm not ducking the question and saying 'we can't know the answer to this mystery because blah blah sacred ineffable', I am saying that the question cannot be asked because it can only be asked within sense to begin with. If you can ask what sense is, your asking is already a first hand demonstration of what it is. It can have no better description, nor could it ever require one. All that is required is for us to stop doubting what we already experience directly. We can doubt whether what we experience is this kind of an experience or that kind, whether it is more 'real' or more like a dream, but we cannot doubt that there is an experience in which there is a feeling of direct participation - a sense which includes the possibility of a sense of motive. > But I have been under the strong impression that you see the > sensory-motive approach as the key precisely fitted to unlocking this > puzzle; hence my enquiry as to the specifics. > Yes, I think it is the frame of the puzzle. If we start from sense, then every piece falls into place eventually. If we start from non-sense, then we can never find the piece of the puzzle which is the puzzle itself. > > To be honest it was the realisation of (or at least the possibility of) a > novel resolution of these issues in the comp formulation of the > world-problem in general that eventually made me waver from my prior > attachment to a sensory-motive approach. > I don't think that you had a sensory-motive approach, I think you probably had an idealist-theoretic approach...the idea of experience as a pseudo-substance rather than ordinary sense/sense-making. > In the end, as I tried to frame counter-arguments in the debate and turned > the thing over and over in my mind, I found that this possibility of > resolution carried more immediate persuasive heft for me than my worries > about the precise metaphysical relation of the various elements of the > schema. After all, we cannot expect to be able to explain everything at > once. > We can if the explanation is felt directly rather than symbolized and communicated. > And also it seemed to me that we were not that far away from being able to > test at least some of this conjecture in "yes doctor" mode, by direct > interface with digital prostheses and the like (hence my posting of that > link). That would be rather persuasive wouldn't it? > Nothing is persuasive until someone is transplanted into a synthetic brain and returns to tell the tale. > We shouldn't have to wait interminably for some unfortunate AI "doll" to > become capable of protesting its heartfelt feelings to our unsympathetic > ear; we could directly experience the computational simulation of real > consciousness for ourselves and let that be the criterion. No? > As long as there is enough of us left to live and participate as a person, we can compensate to some extent for the shortfall of a prosthetic limb. We triangulate the gap and our perception can fill-in to a surprising degree. Only if our entire brain is amputated and replaced successfully will we know what it is like to be a computer rather than a human being. Craig > > 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 [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.
