On 04 Feb 2015, at 02:49, David Nyman wrote:
On 3 February 2015 at 23:11, Stathis Papaioannou
<stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
An epiphenomenon is a necessary side-effect of the primary phenomenon.
The epiphenomenon has no separate causal efficacy of its own; if it
did, then we could devise a test for consciousness. This, by the way,
does not imply that consciousness does not exist or is unimportant.
The parallel examples I would give are emergent phenomena such as the
economy. You might say this is not the same thing because it is
somehow obvious that the economy is "just" the behaviour of its
component parts while this is not obvious for the brain and mind. This
may be a valid point, but what is its significance, in the end?
Well, you still haven't addressed the reference issue (you didn't
the last time I asked you either). On the face of it, your position
would appear to be that there is no such reference; i.e. that
everything is indeed 'just' the behaviour of its component parts,
whatever we suppose those to be. But if so, what are we talking
about? Indeed, in what sense are we even talking at all?
In this regard, your analogy to the economy is indeed inapt, because
it begs the very question at issue. Notions such as the economy are,
after all, 'emergent' only under some interpretation. Absent such
interpretation (which is the very point in question) there would be
(as you acknowledge) no need to invoke such notions in any reductive
account. As to your rhetorical enquiry, it seems to me to be a way
of trivialising further questioning by insinuating that it is, in
some unspecified sense, 'insignificant'. IMO, such a proposal is not
even wrong. It just tells us not to ask.
As far as I understand Bruno's thesis, it might at first glance
appear to share a superficial resemblance to what you seem to mean
by epiphenomenalism. Consciousness is not a 'thing' but a species of
analytic or constitutive truth associated with a reductive
computational ontology as a consequence of the simultaneous
emulation, or 'entanglement', of specific third and first-person
epistemological logics. Consciousness, as truth, is to that degree
an epistemological emergent 'supervening' on computation. But the
difference is in the much greater explanatory potential implicit in
these assumptions. The paradox of reference becomes resolvable
through an explicit epistemology: i.e. the triangulation of parallel
sets of referents in the cross-hairs of computation, belief and
truth. Similarly, questions of' 'causal ordering', at least in
principle, become addressable in terms characteristic of each of
these regimes (e.g. the relation between computational redundancy
and FPI).
ISTM that alternative schemas, of whatever character, must likewise
possess explanatory resources that hold some potential for resolving
fundamental relations of epistemology and ontology, rather than
ignoring, distorting, or trivialising what doesn't fit.
They trivialize computationalism, without taking into account the very
quite different views a machine can "see" itself or herself,
relatively to possible universal neighbors.
They continue to ignore (well some more than others) the impact of
incompleteness which shows that even in the simplest case, machine
have a rich "theology".
It is plausibly not a hazard that Stathis comes back with the notion
of physically closed. The problem of physics is that it does not
address the mind-body problem, except it leads to some encounters with
it at some places (heat and information theory, Interpretation of QM,
cosmology).
Consciousness is driven by the universal machine goal to explore its
G* \ G gap, and the variants. It is the dream of a truth (which might
be true, or not).
I can understand the difficulty to put down the Aristotelian clothes.
We use them for so long. But with computationalism, we don't have much
choice.
Bruno
David
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