On Friday, March 21, 2014 7:04:58 PM UTC-5, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > > On Friday, March 21, 2014 2:11:17 PM UTC-4, Gabriel Bodeen wrote: >> >> >> >> On Friday, March 21, 2014 12:42:13 PM UTC-5, Craig Weinberg wrote: >>> >>> >>> I'm not so much interested in defining CTM, as in exploding the >>> assumptions from which CTM and other mechanistic, information-theoretical >>> models of consciousness arise. >>> >> >> OK. Would you mind defining which assumptions you're thinking of? >> > > The assumptions that forms and functions can exist independently of > perception and participation. > >
What "forms", "functions", and "participation"? There's only one word that has a fairly clear referent. :( It would be more helpful if, instead of talking in general about the kind of assumptions involved, you could just go ahead and list the key assumptions. > >> >>> >>> >>>> >>>> >>>>> They don't reduce to a binary code like we would expect them to in CTM. >>>>> >>>> >>>> That is not a prediction of CTM. Here's a relevant quote from the >>>> Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Turing himself seems to have been of >>>> the opinion that a machine operating in this way would literally be doing >>>> the same things that the human performing computations is doing—that it >>>> would be 'duplicating' what the human computer does. But other writers >>>> have >>>> suggested that what the computer does is merely a 'simulation' of what the >>>> human computer does: a reproduction of human-level performance, perhaps >>>> through a set of steps that is [at] some level isomorphic to those the >>>> human undertakes, but not in such a fashion as to constitute doing the >>>> same >>>> thing in all relevant respects." >>>> >>> >>> Again, either way the development of modality-dependence in non-humans >>> and modality-independence in humans does not support the idea that >>> consciousness is driven by logic and computation. >>> >> >> Right, modality (in)dependent communication neither supports nor opposes >> the idea that consciousness is computation. >> > > No, the fact that modality independent communication does not appear until > human experience does oppose the idea that consciousness is computation, > since computation is by definition modality independent. > Er, no, that's not true in the senses of the terms with which I'm familiar, for the reasons I gave previously. > In CTM, brains doing modality-dependent computations would have minds >> experiencing sense-data qualia, and brains doing modality-independent >> computations would have minds experiencing abstract qualia. >> >> Argh, CTM has nothing to do with brains. That would be a BTM. > OK, but then CTM_Weinberg has major differences from CTM_Others. You've stated that you're not interested in defining CTM_Weinberg and how it differs from CTM_Others, which means at this point all we know is that you're attacking some unspecified assumptions of an unspecified theory. That's not enough for meaningful communication. Would you care to fill in the missing details of precisely which assumptions you wanted to "explode"? -Gabe -- 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/d/optout.
