On 3/8/2015 11:42 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 08 Mar 2015, at 17:23, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 3:42 PM, John Clark <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 7:36 AM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]
<mailto:[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.
?? They don't fail. They're third person, i.e. sharable models of the world.
Consciousness seems not to be sharable (although that might change) so it's harder to give
it material explanation. But not impossible. If we succeed in engineering beings that
behave in every respect as though they are as conscious as other people we will accept
that they are conscious and consciousness is a physically instantiated phenomenon. The
fact that most people disbelieve in the possibility of philosophical zombies already
implies this conclusion. It is just as strong an intuition as saying "Yes" to the
doctor. That's what I mean by engineering dissovling the "hard problem" of consciousness.
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.
You write that often, but I don't see any evidence for it. Aquinas argues that the
material world is just sustained by God's thoughts. Where are the theologians of
Christianity or Buddhism that require primary matter (which I don't think was Aristotle's
idea anyway - it's more properly attributed to Democritus or Leucippus)
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.
That's just the complaint that whatever you assume as basic isn't explained.
Matter/energy/particle is just an hypothesis, like arithmetic, and it's part of a theory
of the world: "Atoms and the void" as Democritus would say. It's a theory which has been
very successful. It accounts for agreement of perception among different persons -
something comp doesn't.
Matter, like God (when used in argument) are concept equivalent with "now shut up and
obey the rules".
Like Peano's axioms or Turing machine 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.
No, it's verified by kicking and seeing if it kicks back.
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.
Just like atoms and the void.
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.
But "logic" isn't a single thing. You introduce various logics by adding modal axioms.
But why those axioms and not some others? Why not multi-valued logics, infinitary logics,
para-consistent logics, non-monotonic logics, constructive logics,... Logic is supposed
to formalize good reasoning. But when it introduces infinities and unintuitive results
(e.g. p doesn't imply (possible p)) that would be rejected by good reasoning one has a
right to be suspicious that it has been pushed beyond it's range of applicability.
Brent
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