On 7/8/2014 12:57 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2014-07-08 21:23 GMT+02:00 meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>>: On 7/8/2014 11:56 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:2014-07-08 20:47 GMT+02:00 meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>>: On 7/8/2014 10:43 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 07 Jul 2014, at 21:13, meekerdb wrote:On 7/7/2014 8:14 AM, David Nyman wrote:On 6 July 2014 04:18, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: >> Yes, but it's a theory of epistemology "after the physical fact". It >> assumes without further justification what it wishes to prove, > > No, it defines a certain kind of belief, just as Bruno identifies belief with "provable in some axiomatic system" (which you must admit is not a standard meaning of "belief") one can identify belief with certain actions in context. I don't know what you mean by "after the physical fact". If it's a physical theory of belief then of course it's explained in terms of physical facts. You seem to reject this as though it's obviously wrong. Not wrong, just not the whole story. My argument has been that any "mechanism of belief" that is hierarchically reducible to a finite set of (assumptive) primitives cannot thereafter rely on the (supposedly) independent effectiveness of derivative notions such as computation as the basis of its "mechanism of knowledge".That sentence seems to just assume what it purports to argue. Why "idependent"; why not "dependent"? What exactly does it mean to "rely on" inan explanation? I think it only means that the explanan is understandable. Your argument would appear to apply to every reductive explanation in thehierarchy - but the hierarchy only exists in virtue of the explanations.This is essentially the same conclusion as MGA or Maudlin and amounts to an insistence on what is most powerful in reductive explanation (i.e. the redundancy of intermediate "levels of effectiveness") .But, as I've argued elsewhere, the MGA and Olympia arguments don't prove what they are generally taken to prove. Reduction must always be applied to anisolated system, which MGA attempts to sneak in by assuming a dream state. But even dreams obtain their meaning from outside referents.But you don't ask the doctor to copy the outside referents, and that is enough to make the MGA doing its job.My not asking is enough?? I think you mean that if he did copy the outside referents then the argument would go through. So for MGA to go through, he does not have to... because MGA is the following. Assumptions: 1- You have a digital conscious program 2- You can record the input of that program (and of course you can, because of assumption 1) 3- You effectively record the input of the program for a certain period of time (with the correct timing) where it is conscious in "our world/reality" 4- you *replay* that input It is clear by 4 that at that stage you do not need any "external" world beside the recorded input. By assumption 1, if the program is conscious, it is still conscious while having the recorded input as input.But would it still be consciousness if there were no world that provided referents for the program? It's the relation to an external world that allows digits and numbers to be *about* something; No the relations are to the machine running the program, any universal machine does the job.
That makes no sense to me. It would mean that when I'm running a simulation of an aircraft that the variables that mean latitude and longitude get that meaning from the Intel CPU.
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