On 6/14/2016 7:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 3:22 AM, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 13/06/2016 7:12 am, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 6/12/2016 10:27 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
William S. Cooper, "The Origin of Reason" makes an argument that mathematics
is a way of brains thinking about things that was found by evolution, just
like mobility, metabolism, reproduction,...and a lot of other functions.
Bruno doesn't like that story though because it means mathematics only
exists as instantiated in brains.
It is not a question of liking this or not. It is just that Cooper, and many
contemporaries, assumed some physical universe, and that this assumption put
the mind-body problem under the rug. It is like saying God made it. They
don't push enough their own Darwinian logic.
That's begging the question. You assume arithmetic; which sweeps the
mind-body problem under the rug by making the "body" part hard. Everybody
starts by assuming something. Assuming physics and providing an evolution
based account of the development of mind and minds development of arithmetic
is just as legitimate as starting with arithmetic and trying to derive
matter and mind.
Assuming arithmetic does not even account for mind, much less account for
matter. Saying that consciousness is a computation is empty until one
specifies precisely what form of computation.
It might be that all computations are conscious -- but with much
different contents, of course. I feel some inclination towards this
hypothesis.
And why that form of
computation rather than some other? I don't see that computationalism
actually solves anything -- the problems it leaves unanswered are every bit
as difficult as the problems one started with.
But computationalism is the default position of modern science. The
brain is a neural network, the neural network is equivalent to a
Turing Machine and it is running a program, and this is what mind is
somehow. Non-computationalism seems to require some form of duality,
appeal to a soul and so on.
I disagree with that last point. As I've frequently argued a
computation instantiating consciousness can only be relative to some
environment - what we call "external reality". The "external reality"
can be part of the same computation; in fact it must be - otherwise, as
you note, we're faced with dualism and explaining how these two
conceptually different things, mind and matter, interact. But just as
one can say they're part of the same computation, one can also say
they're both part of the same physical reality - with a slightly
expanded concept of physical reality. So physicalism can "solve" the
problem of consciousness the same way computationalism does - by
identifying some subset of processes as instantiating consciousness. I
think that's what will happen and "the hard problem" will be superseded
by an engineering solution to AI.
Brent
I don't find that computationalism was created to "solve anything". It
is just the most obvious interpretation of a variety of empirical
observations across fields: neuroscience, biology, chemistry, computer
science.
At least with scientific
realism, one has the objective external world to underpin one's experience:
i.e., one knows that it works, even if one is not quite sure how.
Again, computationalism is the position of scientific realism. But
Bruno's work (unless you mange to refute it) shows that
computationalism is not compatible with the sort of objective external
world that you like. So you have to choose one or the other.
I do agree with you that, as far as I can tell, consciousness remains
a mystery in Bruno's model.
I can see how the UDA is uncomfortable to some people, but like with
all science we can't choose, just check for correctness.
Telmo.
Bruce
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