On 24 Sep 2014, at 23:52, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 6:44 PM, John Clark <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 6:36 PM, Russell Standish <[email protected]
> wrote:
> physicalism, which essentially states that consciousness is
nothing more than an epiphenomenon, that physical processes and
relationships suffice to
fully and completely explain everything.
It's almost a tautology that physical processes and relationships
can explain anything that can be explained, because any explanation
corresponds to a physical arrangement of neurons in various physical
states. Obviously nothing can explain a brute fact because no
explanation exists, and I think that consciousness is the way data
feels when it is being processed is (probably) a brute fact. To put
it another way, I don't think that all sequences of "what caused
that?" questions go on forever, I think some of them terminate.
> John argues that consciousness has real world consequences in
terms of being evolutionary selected
Either that or consciousness is the side effect of something else
that has real world consequences; if Darwin was right it can't be
any other way.
You keep saying this.
You also like to say things like "consciousness is how information
feels when it's being processed". I like that idea. It shows that
you can indeed consider alternatives to the binary choice above. In
this case evolution created a very complex scenario for conscious to
feel when being processed. But it did not create consciousness, nor
does this falsify Darwin's theory in any way.
On the other hand, if evolution created consciousness then it's fair
to ask what its evolutionary advantage is (as opposed to just having
philosophical zombies). Antonio Damásio tried this route, but it's
very unconvincing because he just assumes that consciousness = model
of self. Philosophical zombies can (maybe) have a model of self
without being conscious.
You need the 3p-self (body, image of body, []) and the 1p self (it has
no name, but is well described by the conjunction of []p & p).
That gives knowledge, not yet consciousness, which is more related
with the dual <>p v p, and semantical fixed points. That makes
consciousness into a truth that a machine can access and which the
machine can understand, even justify that she can't justify it to any
other conscious machine (having the S4/G ability to know/believe that,
and at the same time seems equivalent with a sort of knowing of our
existence, where the term "our" is 1p and typically the gate of the
rabbit hole.
Are these guys conscious?
http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/emergent_self_models
Hard to judge. The consciousness is in the abstract loop. You need the
self-model and some amount of self-referential correctness with
respect to you and the probable environments and the arithmetical
reality ("Heaven", that is even above the sigma_1).
Bruno
Telmo.
John K Clark
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