On 27 Oct 2015, at 19:43, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2015-10-27 19:16 GMT+01:00 Brent Meeker <[email protected]>:
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.
I don't know about neurons and interactions with the environment...
but as far as a program is concerned, a program has only access to
memory locations... so if meaning must arise from the POV of the
program (ie: what we could call a conscious program), it must be
internal to itself... What you could say I could agree, is that IO
of our "real" world do provide regularity pattern to those memory
locations when fed with the sensor data... what random value would
not... so one can say that meaning arise from stable pattern...
where they come from and the fact they represent something
ontologically real is unknown to the program...
Yes, that's valid.
Now, the program (or the person attach to it) can bet that it is a
program, and then derive the consequence that it is plausible that he
lives "in arithmetic", and that the physical is the result of an
infinity of universal machine/number competing in producing its
continuation, below its substitution level.
It can also intuit something like that by direct first person
introspection, with different technics.
Bruno
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.
Brent
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