On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 05:27:50PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > On 5/18/2015 5:20 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > >On 19 May 2015 at 07:49, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > > > >>There is a difference in kind, not degree, between the impossible and the > >>highly improbable. > >> > >> > >>I disagree. That's a platonic attitude that we can discriminate between > >>impossible and highly improbable. It comes from a reliance on logical, in > >>which contradictions are "impossible"; but in fact contradictions are > >>properties of language and what we have thought "impossible" in the past > >>based on language, we've found to be the case in fact and had to adjust our > >>language to fit. > >Can you give an example? > > > > > > An object cannot be two places at the same time. > > Bremt >
I totally agree with Brent - and have argued this point before. Supervenience, like emergence, is a type of statistical question, and is as much in the eye of the beholder as anything. Whether or not consciousness supervenes on an astronomically unlikely occurrance is totally moot in any case, and one cannot rely one's intuition in judging the outcome. With a nod to William Paley, if one were to stumble across a machine that acted intelligently and had a consciousness, one would have to assume it to actually be the result of a consious process rather than the result of a random accident. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
