On 22 Sep 2014, at 22:03, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/22/2014 12:07 AM, Kim Jones wrote:
On 22 Sep 2014, at 3:21 pm, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
That's why he can say consciousness is all-or-nothing
(potentialities are all-or-nothing). That's why he thinks an
infant is more conscious than an adult - it has more potential
(but less realization). That's why he thinks losing all your
memories would leave you with the same consciousness.
That's all follows from his definition and it's OK, although it's
not the common meaning of "conscious". What's not OK is to then
rely on the intuition that everybody knows what consciousness is
and that no one can seriously doubt it's existence. Those
statements are true of common usage of "conscious", but not
necessarily true of Bruno's definition.
Brent
Are we not conflating slightly (to be) conscious - the fact of
being aware and sensate; experiencing "being" as it were.....with
"consciousness" that woolly philosophical football? I think even in
comman usage we don't do that. I am conscious of this or that. My
consciousness is kind of my whole psyche (whatever that is - could
be the whole universe or a lotus blossum or whatever).
Bruno merely asserts that nobody can mistake the fact that they
exist.
Some people do, but it's considered pathological.
I assert only that nobody can doubt their own consciousness (here-and-
now, raw consciousness). This is because doubting genuinely requires
being conscious.
Some people claims doubting their existence, but they confuse it with
the existence of their body in some environment. Those claims are hard
to interpret, and often present when doing "mystical exercise" (say).
But Bruno does more than merely assert this. He then uses the same
word, "conscious" in a different, technical sense as a potential
property of an axiomatic system.
This is ambiguous. Consciousness is not a potential property of a
machine/axiomatic-system/RE-set. Consciousness is just attributed to
machine having some potential. It is the ability to infer the
existence of some reality.
I use consciousness always in the same sense, but the more we progress
in the consequence of computationalism, the more we get the reasonable
things we can associate consciousness to.
And then he applies conclusions drawn from the technical sense to
common sense meaning.
Well, that is what we do to see if the theory is not falsified by the
observation. Always. It is admittedly more tricky when it comes on
theories on incommunicable truth that a machine can know (in some
sense, not the Theaetetus' one) without being able to prove or justify.
This is isn't necessarily wrong, but as an argument it leaves a big
gap.
You might elaborate. There is an unavoidable gap about consciousness,
but if you accept the definition and computationalism, the gap is
entirely explained, indeed by the G* minus G non-empty annulus and its
intensional variants. But may be you allude to some other gap, in
which case I would be happy to make it more precise.
Bruno
Brent
To be conscious is to experience "being". My "consciousness" on the
other hand, is the "me" the self, the subject, the "I" - you could
probably say "soul" if you wanted to allude to the fact that this
platonic thing you are is immortal.
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