On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 8:51 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
> > So how did you suffer in the womb? > > > > Indeed I am puzzled by your insistence on consciousness deriving from > relationships with the world, given you seem to be a reductionist > materialist. In a reductionist view, such relationships don't have any > intrinsic meaning, so how is it that the presence or absence of such > relationships can make the difference between "having an experience" and > "not having an experience"? What turns the light on as it were, turning the > zombie into the human, the robot into the "real boy" (guess you've seen the > movie?)? The fact that its internal states are meaningfully correlated to > some "world", whatever that is? Such a correlation might define the > difference between adaptive and non-adaptive functioning, but how does that > distinction instantiate consciousness (or not)? > > OK so that is back to "hard problem", which for people who are > fundamentally interested in engineering is also the "uninteresting problem" > or the "pointlessly distracting problem". > > > I don't think it's unintersting, I think it's unsolvable becuase it's > demanding an explanation and at the same time ruling out any explanation > because it rejects the engineering level explanation. Yet the engineering > level explanation is the one we praise and accept as the gold standard in > every other field. In fact one of the things I like about Bruno's theory > is that it can prove within the computational paradigm exactly what it > unsolvable about the hard problem and why. > > Within a materialist/evolutionist model it is also clear why it is > unsolvable, why we cannot experience the brain processes that produce > experience of the world. It would be an irrelevant and useless and wasteful > use of brain resources at best and would be selected against. At worst it > might produced confusion and instability in thought processes. I think it > is really only through language and symbolic thought that the "hard > problem" can be formulated. > Linguistically sounds like you have a "war on x problem" which is why I think this has left step 8 and is more firmly rooted in denying step 0 at the coffee house or bar, and prohibiting it like we usually do. PGC -- 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.
