Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > What disturbs me the most is our growing inability to say "I don't know". >
I agree and that's the problem I have with David Deutsch, I like his physics but not so much when he starts to wax philosophic, he seems to feel that you always have to pretend that you have a theory that explains something when clearly sometimes you don't, or at least not a theory that's worth more than a bucket of warm spit. > science needs theory. > Saying you must always have a theory is the same as saying you should never admit that you don't know how something works. It's always nice to have but a good theory is not needed to do good science. You could perform a experiment that conforms with all well accepted experimental protocols and yet obtain a result that completely surprises and bewilders you, a result that utterly destroys a theory that you and everybody else believed in before, and nobody has come up with a new a better theory to replace it. The result of that experiment is still science because nature will be the way nature will be and if human beings don't like it or are confused that's just too bad. > >We cannot say things like "consciousness emerges from brain activity" and > claim that science will eventually fill the gaps. > Maybe science will fill the gaps someday but I think it more likely that there is no gap to fill and it's just a brute fact that consciousness is the way data feels like when it is being processed and after that there is nothing more to say about it; in other words it's fundamental and the end the line of a long chain of "what caused that?" questions. Or maybe I'm wrong and the sequence of "what caused that?" questions goes on forever. But it doesn't matter because one thing we do know for sure is that certain types of brain activity causes consciousness; we may not know how it manages to do it but we do know for a fact that it does. > > This is not theory, > True. > > just faith, > False. It's not faith and it's not deduction either, it's induction. > I am sure the brain is an asynchronous computer, that intelligence is a > property of this computer and so on. OK. > The trouble is that none of this seems to explain how consciousness > originates. > As I've said, the lack of understanding of how brain activity causes consciousness does not change the fact that there is a MASSIVE amount of experimental evidence that brain activity causes consciousness. After all, It's not as if deductive reasoning is the only way new knowledge can be obtained. John K Clark -- 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.
