On 13 June 2014 01:27, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > But although we may speculate that consciousness and physical events both > depend on computation (perhaps only in the sense of being consistently > described) it doesn't follow that a UD exists or the conscious/physical > world is an "illusion". People throw around "it's an illusion" so freely > that it ceases to distinguish rhinoceri from unicorns.
You're right, oftentimes they do. But I wouldn't include Bruno in "people" here (if you see what I mean). Once one assumes the existence of the UD (or rather its infinite trace) the hard problem then becomes one of justifying in detail every aspect of the *appearance* of matter through its interaction with mind. Then, as Bruno is wont to say, the problem turns out to be (at least) twice as hard as we might have feared. As to the admissibility of the UD, for me, in the end, it's just another theoretical posit. As it happens, it strikes me as sufficiently motivated, because once computation is fixed as the base, I don't see how one would justify restricting its scope to certain computations in particular. It also suits my Everything-ist predilection (when I'm wearing that hat) to see the world-problem formulated in terms of a self-interpreting Programmatic Library of Babel. But my preferences are neither here or there, of course. What counts, as always, is how fruitful a theory turns out to be. So the proof of the comp pudding, in the end, will lie in its ultimate utility. By that point, should it come, I guess most people will have stopped quibbling about the "existence", or otherwise, of the number 2. >> It should be clear then, under such assumptions, that neither a >> conscious state, nor any local physical mechanism through which it is >> manifested, can any longer be considered basic; > > Aren't conscious thoughts epistemologically basic. They are things of which > we have unmediated knowledge. Yes, they are. But on the comp assumption, they're still in a specific sense derivative. Admittedly this is a subtle distinction that must be handled with care. For example, I don't think that it wouldn't be accurate to say that conscious thoughts are "caused" by arithmetic or computation. It's more that the epistemological consequences turn out to be a logical entailment of the original ontological assumptions. And part of that entailment is that there is indeed a "we" that can have unmediated knowledge of certain truths. >> rather, *both* must >> (somehow) be complex artefacts (albeit with distinctive derivations) >> of a more "primitive" (in this case, by assumption, computational) >> ontology. The relevant distinction, then, is between this set of >> relations and the alternative, in which both consciousness and >> computation are assumed to be derivative on a more basic (hence >> "primitive") formulation of matter. > > I can agree with that. It is consistent with my point that "primitive > matter" is undefined and could be anything if we just called it "ur-stuff" > instead of "matter". Good. Perhaps that's all a little clearer, then. 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-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/d/optout.
