On 10/26/2015 3:37 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 10:44:28AM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 10/26/2015 2:43 AM, Russell Standish wrote:
Assuming computationalism, our everyday experience _is_ internal to the
system. That doesn't make it any less meaningful.
I think that's a confusion. The system is the universe with it's
physics. So in a sense everything is internal to it. But
experience is individual and it's meaningful because the individual
has values and memory and so incorporates experiences into decisions
about future actions...that's what constitutes giving them
semantics.
Hi Brent, I appreciate your point of view very much, but I fail to see
how what you say is incompatible with my claim. Where is the
confusion?
I think our everyday experience is given meaning as referring to things
outside ourselves. So it's not internal to "the system" that is the
experiencer. It is only because the observer is distinct from the rest
of the world that he can form meaningful symbolic representations of it.
The only clarification I would make is that (with computationalism)
the system is formal, but the observer (individual in your
terminology) and environment (universe with its physics in your
terminology) are a non formal partition of the system.
I'm not sure what you mean by non-formal partition. If your brain is
replaced by a I/O functionally equivalent digital computer it will still
be in an environment and will have internal representations that refer
to the environment.
Brent
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