On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 06:21:04PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > Hi Russell, Hi Others, > > Sorry for the delay. Some comments on your (Russell) MGA paper > appear below. > > > > Incidentally, when you see the complexity of the interaction between > the roots of trees and the soils, chemicals and through bacteria, > and when you believe, as some experiences suggest, that trees and > plant communicate, I am not so sure if trees and forest, perhaps on > different time scale, have not some awareness, and a self-awareness > of some sort. (I take awareness as synonymous with consciousness, > although I change my mind below!). >
Intra-plant communication appears to be too simple to support consciousness, but rhizozone networks are indeed a different story. We can leave it as an open problem whether the rhizozone of a forest could be conscious, just as we're prepared to consider ant colonies as conscious. > > > OK. I will make a try. Awareness in its most basic forms comes from > the ability to distinguish a good feeling from a bad feeling. The > amoeba, like us, knows (in a weak sense) that eating some paramecium > is good, but that hot or to cold place are bad, and this makes it > reacts accordingly with some high degrees of relative > self-referential correctness. This definition would grant consiousness to thermostats. I don't believe it is enough - it really evacuates the concept of consciousness. But until there is some agreement on what "consciousness" means, this will be a sterile debate. ... > > I agree that to have awareness, you need a self, a third person > self. But that is well played by the relative body (actually bodies, > incarnate through the UD). > > Maybe we should define consciousness by self-awareness, and then > self-consciousness would be the higher form of self-self-awareness? > That makes one "self" per reflexive loop. > What's the distinction? > > > > > > > >Attacks on anthropic reasoning will work better by choosing a > >reference class which is indisputably a subset of the reference class, > >such as all human beings, and then demonstrating a contradiction. I > >thought I had come up with such an example with my "Chinese paradox", > >but it turned out anthropic reasoning was rescued from that by the > >peculiar distribution of country population sizes that happens to hold > >in reality. AR has proved remakably resilient to empirical tests. > > I am still a bit agnostic for its use in the fundamentals, as the > probability, with computationalism, are always relative. It is the > same in quantum mechanics, where the probabilities are not on > states, but on relative states: they have always the form <a I b>^2, > the probability for finding b when being in the state a. > But we can extract useful information from the Anthropic principle, > and even from the most general Turing-thropic. Just saying that the > laws of physics should be a calculus of relative probabilities. But the AP is applied relatively anyway. Indeed, there is evidence that the absolute measure is not positive real-valued, so the only meaningful probabilities are relative. > > > PS I have printed your MGA paper, and so read it and comment it > despite being in a busy period. > > Let me say here, as we are in the good thread, two main points, > where we might have vocabulary issue, or perhaps disagree on > something? So you might think about this and be prepared :) > > The first point concerns the relation between counterfactualness and > modal realism, that you link in a way which makes me a bit uneasy. I > do believe in some links between them, though, but it might not > correspond to yours. Examples will follow later. > > The second point is the one we have already discussed, and concerns > the definition of supervenience. We do both agree on the Stanford > definition, but I am still thinking you are misusing it when apply > to the Alice and Bob in the classroom situation. > > You agree that > C supervenes on B if to change C it is necessary to change B. > For example, consciousness C supervenes on a brain activity B, > because to change that consciousness you need to change that brain > activity. > I address this in the paper. What you go on to say that consciousness C (ie the consciousness attached to body C, which is in B) supervenes on B+A, which is correct. But my point is that consciousness itself (not necessarily attached to a particular body or person) is not supervenient on B+A in this case, as the consciousness could be a C or a D (where D supervenes on A). Where this matters is that one cannot say consciousness supervenes on the universal dovetailer. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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.
