On 08 Mar 2015, at 22:16, meekerdb wrote:
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]>
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.
?? They don't fail.
They fail. That's what the UDA explains, and AUDA illustrate. Then
people like Dennet and the Churchland, and other "eliminativist"
illustrates the failure by the persistent attempt to put the problem
under the rug.
They're third person, i.e. sharable models of the world.
Of the physical neighborhood.
Consciousness seems not to be sharable (although that might change)
so it's harder to give it material explanation.
Wiuth computationalism, materialism provides an explanation why to
attribute consciousness to some entities, but it fails to explain to
that consciousness why it seems attach to a physical reality. Unless
you intrioduce non Turing emulable and non FPI recoverable properties
of matter, you are bound up to find an explanation, and actually all
machine face that problem, then the logic of introspection shows the
beginning of the answer, in a testable way.
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.
We do that, presumably, when we do babies. OK. But you forget UDA
(even without step 8).
With comp, the hard problem of consciousness is first an hard problem
of matter. Consciousness itself is not difficult, it is the
undoubtable fixed point of the doubt, knowable by all machine, (by the
closure for the diagonalisation).
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.
I can agree, as consciousness is only the mental state of a believer
in a reality. It is the zero-mystical state, and we born from that,
and it is realize in an innumerable ways in the arithmetical reality.
But this works only if the propositional material view fits with the
facts. Thanks to the quantum, it fits. Up to now.
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.
Yes, Christians *are* closer to Plato than we might think. But the
argument is weak, yet similar to Berkeley in this place.
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)
They got the idea of atoms, and ... mechanism (simple interaction
driven complex process). Not the idea that matter is primary, and
physics is the fundamental science. Although this is in gestation in
the atomists.
Yes, many school of buddism are less incoherent on this than Aristole
(who is incoherent with respect to the comp assumption, to be sure).
I was thinking mainly to the jews, after Maimonides, or the christians
after Justinian, or the Muslims later. Science is born with the idea
that reality might not be WYSIWYG, but the bad habits came back
quickly ...
Then the catholic needed it, to get the notion that bread is the body
of christ, and also the resurrection of bodies.
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.
There is a difference between assuming a physical reality, and
assuming some little truth, like
Kxy = x, or like 0 + x = x,
And in the case of something Turing emulable, but minimal, we can
explain why we do need such assumptions.
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.
It does conceptually, the details are complex but interesting, like
evolution explain human apparition, but the details are overwhelmingly
complex.
But my point is that such hypotheiss fials on the hard problem of
consciousness, which with comp needs to explain the appearance of
matter/energy, from simpler, conceptually, relations.
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.
Not at all. provably so if you accept Church's thesis. You can ask
anything, but you don't need to assume what must be explained, to get
the correct mind-body relationship, and distinguish quanta from qualia.
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.
Like with comp. That is why I say: let us test comp. Up to now, it fits.
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.
except that nobody knows what atoms are. They belong to what we want
explain. Comp needs just one thing Turing universal, but physicalist
says: no it is only that one. When asked why; they say: because we
observed it. That does not solve the problem, neither of mind, nor of
matter.
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?
Because the math of self-reference leads to G and G*, and to the
intensional variants corresponding to the different points of view.
Because computers obeys computer science.
Why not multi-valued logics, infinitary logics, para-consistent
logics, non-monotonic logics, constructive logics,...
Yes, that is justified from natural languages, and many practical
problem, but non relevant to understand where the laws of physics come
from.
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.
No, the intuition that p -> <>p is explained by the intensional
variants. You cannot change at will what a correct machine can prove
about itself, like you can't divide by zero.
Computer science is part of arithmetic and meta-arithmetic, which is
itself in large part in arithmetic. But from inside, thing looks
bigger, analytical, physical.
Matter does not disappear with comp, but it has a non material (indeed
arithmetical) explanation.
Bruno
Brent
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