On 14 Oct 2014, at 17:21, David Nyman wrote:
On 14 October 2014 11:49, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
They eliminate consciousness because they grasp that it is the only
way to keep the aristotelian belief in a creation intact.
I seem to be motivated to comment at some length on this topic! It
must be because of what I've been reading and thinking about
recently. Graziano writes, in an attempt to justify, in evolutionary
terms, how the brain might come to "believe" (incorrectly) that it
is subjectively aware:
Of course the brain itself is never aware. It is the (first) person
supported by that brain which becomes, well, not conscious, but
incarnated relaively to an environment/history.
"...my colleagues and I have been developing the "attention schema"
theory of consciousness, which may explain why that computation is
useful and would evolve in any complex brain. Here's the gist of it:
Take again the case of color and wavelength. Wavelength is a real,
physical phenomenon; color is the brain's approximate, slightly
incorrect model of it. In the attention schema theory, attention is
the physical phenomenon and awareness is the brain's approximate,
slightly incorrect model of it. In neuroscience, attention is a
process of enhancing some signals at the expense of others. It's a
way of focusing resources. Attention: a real, mechanistic phenomenon
that can be programmed into a computer chip. Awareness: a cartoonish
reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the
brain's internal model of color."
Aristotle (and animals) wrong belief (with respect to mechanism).
He's quite explicit here about the primacy of physical brain-based
explanation. But he also appeals to computation within this brain-
first explanatory schema, as in his distinction between wavelength
as a "real, physical phenomenon" and color as an approximate "model"
of it.
So it can't work.
The problem for this style of explanation is that, in terms of his
explicit schema, any "software" model is entirely reducible to
primary brain "hardware". The "real, physical phenomena" of the
brain are fundamental and hence only physical phenomena are
accessible as objects of selection in any evolutionary account,
assuming physical primacy.
This could be locally correct, though.
This distinction vitiates any attempt to justify the differential
selection of any particular "software" organisation since any such
selection must already be fully accounted for on the basis of "real,
physical phenomena". IOW, it actually provides no non-question-
begging explanation of why there would be any selective advantage
for either "attention" or "awareness" per se in this schema, as both
would be equally subsumed in their "real" physical implementation.
OK.
Neither account could be more than an a posteriori re-description of
what had already been selected in the "real, physical" regime, on
the basis of purely "hardware" criteria. Properly understood, such
"soft" concepts must be seen as explanatorily redundant - as you
imply - if material explanation is accepted as primary.
In short: If Aristotle were right, there would be no need of dreams
to explain why there were machines. But if Plato is right, then we
need machines to explain why we are dreaming.
Machines of "little Gods" (machines with oracle, or super-machine, if
that can exist). OK.
Bruno
David
--
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.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
