On 9/21/2014 6:58 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 3:22 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 9/21/2014 5:07 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 1:34 AM, LizR <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Good point Brent and one on which I am also equivocal, which is why I
have been
keen to tease out whether people are talking about consciousness or the
contents of consciousness, and to try to work out whether there is, in
fact, any difference. If there isn't, consciousness becomes something
like
/elan vital/, a supposed magic extra that isn't in fact necessary in
explanatory terms - all that exists are "bundles of sensations" (or
however
Hume phrased it).
But in materialism we still have a magic extra: matter itself. In the MUH
math is
the magic extra. I don't know of any theory that gets rid of all "magic"
assumptions.
True. But matter explains lots of other stuff. Consciousness as a pure
potentiality, distinct from any content, doesn't explain anything.
In reply to John's comment, we /don't/ know that sure that certain
types of
brain activity cause consciousness, that's a (very reasonable)
hypothesis based
on the fact the two appear to be always correlated.
We don't even know if they are strongly correlated, because we don't know
what else
is conscious.
And we don't know that other people are conscious. But as JKC pointed out
we do
know that things that affect our brain affect our consciousness. Quite
aside from
anesthesia and concussions that make it go away (modulo your theory that we
merely
forget), it's affected by whiskey and pot and salvia and LSD, and the
effects are
even amenable to some explanation at the molecular level.
Is an insect swarm conscious? Is your computer? Are galaxies? The problem
is that
we might be confusing empathy for consciousness. It is clear that the more
an
organism is similar to us the more empathy we feel (human > monkey > cat >
insect >
bacteria, ...).
That's true on Bruno's definition of consciousness.
I don't understand what you're driving at. Telmo seems to be asserting ignorance of
types of statements concerning consciousness.
If you negate this, don't you have to show your hand more than resorting to discourse
examples?
I'm saying that things like insect swarms or galaxies are likely to be conscious by
Bruno's definition. All they must have is the potential for Turing computing.
But that's not the consciousness that we are told is indubitable and which
we all
intuititively know we have.
This would be true concerning sufficiently rich machines as well...which is why I don't
see if/how your distinction leads anywhere.
It's saying that any explanation of consciousness needs to explain the conscious inner
narrative I experience. It's cheap to redefine consciousness as the potential for
universal computation, because the potential for universal computation is common. If the
potential for universal computation is going to explain consciousness-as-I-experience-it,
the explanation can't just rely on the assumption that brains do computation. It needs to
say how the computation a brain does is different from the computation a galaxy does.
Brent
We attribute consciousness to other things as we perceive their behavior to
be
intelligent and goal directed; because that's how we recognize it in people:
"How
many fingers do you see?" "What day is it?" "Do you know where you are?".
Brent
--
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]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
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]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
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.
