On 08 Mar 2015, at 17:23, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 3:42 PM, John Clark <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 7:36 AM, Telmo Menezes
<[email protected]> wrote:
>> I have generally been inclined to agree with JKC that natural
selection can't act on consciousness, only on intelligence; so
consciousness is either a necessary byproduct of intelligence or
it's a spandrel.
> If you assume materialism.
In science if you don't assume materialism then one theory works as
well (and as poorly) as any other theory.
It seems you are confusing materialism with falsifiability. A theory
can be falsifiable without assuming materialism. In fact, most
scientific theories do not have to assume materialism at all. They
just make successful predictions about future observations.
That's why all non-materialistic theories of consciousness are such
a colossal waste of time, they're so bad they're not even wrong.
Just like the materialistic ones.
Well, the materialist theories just fail. That *is* the mind-body
problem. That is the hard problem of consciousness. The first hard
thing to do to solve it, when assuming mechanism, is to abandon the
concept of matter, which is really only a "god-of-the-gap" in both the
explanation of mind and of matter (or to abandon the notion of
consciousness, of course)
The problem of the current institutionalized religions is that they
take for granted Aristotle's primary matter. But even for Aristotle
himself, this was a ... focus of attention on what happens nearby, the
greeks already got the "reversal". Some like Xeusippes and the
(neo)pythagoreans were open to a (simple?) mathematical reality.
Materialism fails, because there is no evidence for primitive matter,
not does the notion of primary explains anything. Matter, like God
(when used in argument) are concept equivalent with "now shut up and
obey the rules".
Matter can be seen as a simplifying assumption, formally equivalent to
a strong physical induction, which in particular is violated a priori
with comp. They introduce a simplifying identity link between 1p and
3p, which is not verify in arithmetic, nor in the SWE actually.
And I use "materialism" in its weaker sense of metaphysical or
theologic doctrine assuming a primitive material reality. By
"primitive" I always mean something which is estimated as having to be
assumed.
Quite the contrary with elementary arithmetic or Turing equivalent. It
is a Turing universal structure, and in a simple sense, it can be
shown that it has indeed to be postulated. You cannot reduce it at
anything which is not already Turing equivalent with it, and with
Church thesis, this is of a considerable generality, yet a highly non
trivial obeying precise theoretical laws.
The second recursion theorem of Kleene provides an abstract biology,
an abstract psychology/theology, and an abstract physics, on a plateau.
The machine already explains all this, the problem comes more from the
humans who don't listen. Judson Web already saw that machines can
refute the Gödelian argument by Lucas, "against mechanism". Penrose
argument is a variant of Lucas, and again the machine can refute it.
Logicians knows that when they care about the question.
Bruno
Telmo.
John K Clark
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