On 10/26/2015 11:57 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2015-10-27 7:44 GMT+01:00 Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>>: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.In a computer... an io, is just a memory location... as anything else is... that the value of that memory location reflect or not an external world... doesn't change anything from the POV of the program reading it... so as the meaning must somehow be internal to the program as to what that value at that memory location means for it.
That's like saying a neuron in your brain doesn't know anything. In a sense it's true, but it obfuscates the source of meaning. What your neurons, as a brain, know are things about the external world (external to the brain) with which they interact. The "meaning" is internal in the sense that it is represented by a pattern in the brain - but it is only meaning because it has referents outside the brain. A brain that had never had an environment with which to interact would not have anything to represent and would contain no "meaning". It would be like the computer running a random or unknowable program, or the rock that computes everything.
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