On 29 Apr 2014, at 00:32, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 10:48 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
telmo, would it be ok to clarify the relation t matter you don't see
for consciousness? Do you mean you don't see as true he hypothesis
that matter is conscious ? Or you don't see that the physical bring
produces consciousness?
I mean the hypothesis that the physical brain produces
consciousness. I'm not saying it's false, I'm just saying that there
is not reason to give more credence to this hypothesis than others:
for example, that mater is a byproduct of consciousness.
For all the stuff that is covered by the current scientific
paradigm, we either have understanding or a glimpse of
understanding. For example: we don't know how the brain stores
memories, but we understand enough basic principles that it is
possible to imagine a progression from our current level of
understanding to full understanding. We know about neurons, how they
connect in a complex network to create an asynchronous computer and
so on. This initial knowledge already leads to technology, like face
recognition. But with consciousness, we don't even have a glimpse of
understanding. There's no gradient of complexity to climb. We don't
even know where to start.
I agree that there is no gradient of complexity to climb, but once we
assume the computationalist hypothesis, it seems to me that we do have
a place to start: computer science and the logic of self-reference,
including the intensional variants.
Such logics imply the existence of truth, that we can "know" to be
true, in some immediate sense, and they implies also that such truth
are not rationally justifiable, making some of them good candidate for
consciousness. It can also be shown (that is even easy) that such
"consciousness" is an invariant for some "recursive substitution or
digital copy", reverifying comp "from inside". (That does not "prove"
comp, of course).
We don't have to climb in complexity, we need only to learn to
distinguish the many internal views of the (many) Löbian numbers from
inside arithmetic relatively to many universal numbers (more
precisely: finitely many (like in this list) together with infinitely
many, like in QM or in comp below our substitution level.
So I propose that the current mainstream scientific belief that the
brain produces consciousness is mysticism.
Which might perhaps make sense if the substitution level is
*infinitely low*. In that case we have to say "no to *all* doctors",
and comp is false.
"infinitely low" is not really a matter of scaling, but like in QM, of
isolation from the environment or the relative universal numbers.
But even this way to escape comp has its problems. If it is done
constructively enough (using the constructive transfinite), then the
consequences above still follows and we loss "unicity" again. If is is
done non constructively, things get just more complex, and you need to
be either god, or inconsistent, to conclude anything from that. Matter
(primitive matter) becomes then a conceptual gap object whose only
role would be to escape the consequence of comp. That is worst than
(genuine) mysticism, that's pseudo-science or pseudo-religion.
Cheers!
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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