On 20 May 2014, at 02:21, meekerdb wrote:
On 5/19/2014 4:56 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 9:33 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 5/19/2014 11:31 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 8:09 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 5/19/2014 10:24 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 7:06 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 5/19/2014 2:38 AM, LizR wrote:
His main interest is the mind-body problem; and my interest in
that problem is more from an engineering viewpoint. What does
it take to make a conscious machine and what are the advantages
or disadvantages of doing so. Bruno says a machine that can
learn and do induction is conscious, which might be testable -
but I think it would fail. I think that might be necessary for
consciousness, but for a machine to appear conscious it must be
intelligent and it must be able to act so as to convince us that
it's intelligent.
That is fair enough, but it (of course) assumes primary
materialism -
No it doesn't. Why do you think that? I think "assuming primary
materialism" is a largely imaginary fault Bruno accuses his
critics of. Sure physicists study physics and it's a reasonable
working hypothesis; but nobody tries to even define "primary
matter" they just look to see if another layer will be a better
layer of physics or not.
But I think Bruno's criticism is that physics->psychology is
assumed,
Assumed by whom though? Physicists working on physics?
Probably. Philosophers working on consciousness? Some do, some
don't.
By scientists in general, I would say. Physicists are the easiest
to forgive, their work seems valid either way. Neuroscientists,
psychologists and social scientists are not so easy to forgive. I
personally have no problem with assuming primary materialism,
provided that you are aware that it is an assumption.
For thousands of years humans looked for consciousness and agency
in everything. Then one day someone said let's just
forget about ulimate truth and God and what's primary and let's
just see what we can say about the shadows...and that's when modern
science took off.
The discovery of the scientific method had nothing to do with the
abandonment of deep questions. It had to do with a rejection of
appeals to authority. Don't believe the guy in the funny robe, do
the experiment -- and sometimes the thought experiment.
But the authorities being abandoned, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine,
Aquinas were all of the opinion that thinking about deep questions
was the way to learn about the world. What was the perfect form?
What was the natural state of a substance? Plato denigrated
observation as "looking at shadows" and the world as an imperfect
reflection of ideal forms.
OK. Well, Platonists just believe in another non physical reality,
capable of explaining the existence or appearance of reality. God, if
you want, but not in any popular stop-asking sense. It might be a
mathematical reality, or an aritmetical one, like with mechanism.
Sure there was rejection of the authority of the Church and the
ancients - but in favor of what? The protestants just changed to
the Bible as the sole authority (and invented fundamentalism).
Science arose from rejecting authority in favor of observation of
"the shadows".
Yes, and it favors the shorter and conceptually simpler attempt to
relate what we can verify on the shadow on different circumstances.
You can't observe the ur-stuff of the world, you can only make up
models, show they work, and see what ontology they imply.
Exactly.
Bruno
Which leads us to philosophers, which are largely irrelevant at
the moment -- because of their own sort-comings and because there
is a strong bias against deep questions in current culture. I think.
For me, the relevance of this sort of issue is personal (another
preoccupation that goes a bit against the zeitgeist, which is
increasingly self-centred but in a superficial fashion). For
example, ISTM that it has strong implications in terms of deriving
a rational code of ethics and in making life choices.
Really? I don't see the implications. Bruno proposes to derive
physics, specifically QM from his theory; not change it. So there
are no new implications there. Deepak Chopra will no doubt take
advantage of it to get rich on some more "thinking will make it so"
woo-woo...when he hears about it. What implications do you refer to?
Brent, with all due respect. I value your contributions to the
mailing list and learned from them. Even when I disagree with you,
you have interesting things to say. But you are too quick with the
labelling. It's not really fair play. I think it's quite obvious
that I am not defending guys in funny robes or Deepak Chopra.
Sorry I didn't mean to imply you did and I certainly know that you
don't. I just mentioned him as someone who will try to draw (his
usual) ethical implications from whatever new sounding science there
is. But you didn't answer my question. What are the new
implications you see?
Brent
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