Sniping may have sophisticated pejorative connotation in English, but it also happens to be appropriate for provoking responses, or pushing people's buttons on fundamental question, while pretending to discuss some other topic, like MGA in our case.
For two weeks now, I've read what appear to be not so subtle jabs taken at mystic, platonic, immaterialist kind of position; with you always going "what?", when queried. First I reacted, guessing you were being grumpy... then everything kept on business as usual, until gradually the image emerged that I'm not the only one who has felt this lately or is being oversensitive/defensive. Doesn't mean I'm right on this, just underlines that there might me more to your posts of late than meets the eye of "devolved discussion". If you want to roll out the fundamental discussion yet again, than it would be kind to let someone as obtuse as yours truly know, as I try to parse your lines in this thread as relating to MGA and repeatedly hit walls. It's not transgression of some rule, it's as Liz states "a politeness thing", which you usually observe. PGC On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 11:29 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 8/14/2014 11:40 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: > > > > > On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 7:59 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 8/14/2014 1:41 AM, Russell Standish wrote: >> >>> On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 10:25:40AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: >>> >>>> I agree with you in general, but I can agree a little bit with Liz >>>> too, as I find Brent slightly sneaky on this issue, but all in all >>>> Brent is rather polite and seems sincere. Yet his critics (of step >>>> 8) is not that clear. But then that is why we discuss. Anyone seeing >>>> Brent's point can help to make it clearer. >>>> >>>> His point is that he doesn't believe input free computations can be >>> conscious - there must always be some referrent to the environment >>> (which is noisy, counterfactual, etc). >>> >> >> Right. > > > Then it'd be no problem for you guys to clearly spell out what that > environment is. > > > Yes, that's a problem. The MGA considers a computational sequence that > produces some conscious thought. I think that in order for the > computational sequence to have meaning it must refer to some context in > which decision or action is possible. > You repeatedly beg the question here to give rise to some unspecified context though that isn't Turing emulable it seems, especially with the force you insist these days. > That's what makes it about something and not just a sequence of events. > I initially thought of it in terms of the extra states that had to be > available for counterfactual correctness in response to an external > environment, e.g. seeing something, having a K_40 atom decay in your brain. > But now I've think the necessity of reference is different than > counterfactual correctness. For example if you had a recording of the > computations of an autonomous Mars Rover they wouldn't really constitute a > computation because the recording would not have the possibility of > branching in response to inputs. And the inputs wouldn't necessarily be > external, at a different state of the Rover's learning the same sequence > might have triggered a different association from memory. So the referents > are not necessarily just external, they include all of memory as well. > That doesn't seem to be a problem for MGA reasoning on comp supervenience though, although I'd have to reflect on it and read what you or others may reply elaborating on this matter. Without trivializing and indeed seeing this as a strength of comp, I'd chalk up the necessity of reference you posit as part and parcel of any universal number observing a vast arithmetic. This would not be "anything goes-Land" because 4 is not prime and such property would hold unless you do some really funky moves. 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.
