On 27 Oct 2015, at 19:16, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 10/26/2015 11:57 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2015-10-27 7:44 GMT+01:00 Brent Meeker <[email protected]>:
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.
?
It would be like a computer running a program, and if that is a self-
referential program looking inward (in the precise Gödel's sense and
its intensional variants), he will describe, and attribute meaning, to
what Parmenides, Moderatus of Gades and Poltinus describe (which is
not a coincidence as Parmenides, Moderatus of Gades and Poltinus are
rationalist open, not to irrationalism, but surrationalism).
You too, do this by invoking some "World". Universal machines are
compelled to assume that. It is a theorem of arithmetic.
That is the beauty of Gödel's theorem, it shows that reason can
understand the necessity of something extending reason, without
contradicting it, but justifying it. Provably so, if we assume we are
(enough arithmetically correct) machine.
Bruno
Brent
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