On 16/06/2016 5:26 pm, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 1:33 AM, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 15/06/2016 12:19 am, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 3:22 AM, Bruce Kellett
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.
But then you explain nothing. You have just made an identification
"computation = consciousness", which tells us nothing useful
Yes, my point here is that, in the worst case, you are no worse than
you would be with physicalism in terms of explaining consciousness,
but at least you are taking modern science seriously (the brain looks
like a computer).
I don't see any reason why physicalism might be thought to be in
conflict with a computational model of consciousness. The evidence that
consciousness supervenes on the physical brain is overwhelming, so no
model of consciousness can deny that the physical has an important role.
As discusses in another post, I do think that Bruno's ideas (with the
help of Gödel) provide an explanation to why consciousness looks like
a mystery to us.
Maybe most of the mystery is in the eye of the beholder! Evolution
provides a perfectly comprehensible route to consciousness, and more
details about the mechanism will come from advances in the neurological
sciences by the usual channels.
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.
Have you never heard of supervenience? Consciousness is just a property of
matter in certain configurations and acting in certain ways. Such a position
does not deny that consciousness has some similarities to a computation, but
recognizes that it is a computation performed by a brain composed of matter.
There is no inherent duality.
Yes, of course. I see 2 possibilities:
1) Matter is fungible, so it doesn't matter which atoms are performing
the computation. In this case the same configuration can be repeated,
and you get the same first-person indeterminacy that Bruno describes
in the UDA;
Matter almost certainly is fungible, but there might be a problem with
scaling a computer model for individual neurons, or small groups of
neurons, up to the size of the full brain. I know no details, but I have
seen mention of this recently.
2) There is some unknown property of matter that makes atoms (or
whatever building block) non-fungible. What makes me me is partly the
presence of a set of specific atoms (with invisible labels given by
some unknown law of physics).
Unlikely.
2) seems absurd given that, as far as we know, all the matter that
makes up our body is eventually replaced several times throughout our
lifetime. Perhaps there are exceptions in the skeleton, but all sorts
of bones have been replaced by prosthetic ones with no apparent
problem... So it seems that we are persistent phenomena along time,
not specific chunks of matter.
I would agree, but this seems peripheral to the main issue of
computationalism vs physicalism. In terms of explanations of
consciousness, it seems to me that they are essentially on a par --
neither gives a comprehensive account.
Bruce
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