On 7 Apr 2017 11:53 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]> wrote:
On 4/7/2017 3:22 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > As I remarked before, it is as if consciousness were concealed from the > outside by a two-part public/private encryption scheme. Whereas the public > part is in principle entirely extrinsically inspectable the decryption can > be completed only in terms of the private perspective of *the system in > question*. This then inevitably entails that decrypted messages of this > kind must be inter-subjectively incommunicable despite the ultimate irony > that they amount to the entirety of inter-subjectively "shareable" concrete > reality. It is of course in this sense also that the brain is secondary to > consciousness: i.e. that self-referential perceptual apprehension is the > filter through which a concrete reality, with all its brains and bodies, is > enabled in the first place to emerge (and I do mean emerge in a strong > sense). That primary "grasp on reality" is what enables any subsequent > abstract analysis in terms of a reductive "bottom up" physical mechanism > playing the role of a locally-dominating computational mechanism (or IOW > what you have termed the reversal of physics and machine psychology). > But what, in the computations of the UD, is "perceptual apprehension"? Bruno says that the physical world in not computed, the way some people speculate that "we are a simulation", but only thoughts are computed and the physical world is inferred. Yes of course, but it's that very "inference" in the first person perspective that unavoidably must present as perceptual apprehension before it can be abstracted to any other level of analysis. The point I've been making (which goodness knows is hardly novel in these discussions) is that the existence of self-reflexive computations is what permits the emulation of an internal or subjective logic in terms of which there can be precisely this direct apprehension (a term etymologically related to grasping) of a concrete perceptual reality. And the logical cost of any denial that such apprehension is veridical (as, at least at face value, in the case of Churchland or Dennett) must be the loss not only of such concrete perception in itself (and no, this conjunction of concrete and perceptual isn't a contradiction), but also the entire sense of any purported utterance that could otherwise be understood as referring to it. I agree that the physical world is inferred from those perceptions that have point-of-view-invariance as my friend Vic Stenger called it. But I don't see how a POVI subset of UD computations can just be picked out by some anthropic principle. ISTM they must have some computed unity independent of conscious thoughts (which must be a subset of zero measure). Yes indeed, but don't you have it backwards here? Surely it's rather that a POVI non-zero subset of reflexive UD computations is hypothesised to pick out a physical world in which it is itself embedded. That's implicit in the comp theory. And note that this physical world is in the first instance apprehended (perceived, grasped) as a concrete percept. Any other level of analysis can only ever be a secondary inference from this primary apprehension. And my point is that if, instead of this, you jump ahead to the point at which the "physical computation" is already independently assumed (aka primitive) there can be no further a priori need for any hypothesis of subjectivity or for that matter any concrete perceptual reality that might accompany it. A self-sustaining bottom-up-all-the-way-down physical mechanism can have no principled rationale for such baroque supplementary hypotheses. Computation, by contrast, unavoidably implies precisely the contrary. Hence that is one of its chief recommendations for evaluation as a TOE. Of course you are right that, in terms of the computational ontology assumed at the outset, this hypothesised subset must be evaluated independently of the conscious thought to which it is supposed to give rise. And it is an open problem whether such a subset is indeed most plausibly encapsulated within the kind of consistent quantum-logical physical mechanism that we take to underlie our shared perceptual reality. This question of course lies at the heart of the whole enterprise. Its plausibility must be evaluated, amongst other considerations, with respect to computational relative measure in the face of the entire trace of the UD, the complexities of which I confess I am incompetent to assess. David Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
