On 13 April 2017 at 10:09, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > Oops. > > Yet, you asked me about the modal logic, and I do think at some point I > have to say precisely what the G box [] is for. It is simple, but long and > tedious. I hope you have not too much difficulties with my previous post. > > To make this accessible, the universal dovetailer argument can be seen as > a layman version of the "machine interview (the G logics and its variants > imposed by itself). (even if it came befoe in my mind when observing the > amoebas). I replace the machine by a human willing to be that he is a > machine, and the thought experiments explains the reversal. The G logics > makes this precise, and more abstract/general, but it relies on the > extra-ordinary works on computability and logic of Gödel and others, which > are not that difficult, but is hard to sell without some precision. Don't > hesitate to encourage me to rewrite a passage in some more shorter way, in > case you lose the line. >
Thanks for this Bruno. I suppose I ought to say I have some special interests here. In the first place, my interest is in understanding what ultimately could justify characterising any phenomenon as internal, intrinsic, or subjective; IOW what is called 1p in this forum. The reason is that I think this is an extremely under-examined, not to say almost terminally confused, notion in philosophy of mind and the one where things tend to go wrong at the start. For example, the idea that we can appeal to some "inner" nature of matter as in panpsychism, weaselling about "illusion" or "seeming" in what is variously called materialism, physicalism or naturalism, or the biological obscurantism resorted to by Searle in the face of the Chinese Room argument. This is also part of what I was getting at about unexamined extra presuppositions more or less tacitly assumed in informal reasoning - in this case the implicitly assumed "free lunch" of an inner or subjective point of view absent any explicit supporting rationale. So one of the most interesting things about comp for me has always been the possibility of explicating such a perspective explicitly in terms of a logic particular to the first-person. The reason I see this as so central is to do with the gap between syntax and semantics, to use Searle's terminology. This gap has struck many as unbridgeable, whether frankly so as in mysterianism (e.g. McGinn) or implicitly in the belief that all further questioning will effectively be terminated by a completed neuroscience. So what I find of particular interest in comp is the possibility of bridging this gap in an intelligible manner. I cited Wittgenstein's idea of the explanatory ladder that is discarded when the sought-after next level is reached. In this case the ladder is the temporary conceptual aid of an external interpretation (aka a view from nowhere) imposed on what is still fundamentally a third-person syntactical procedure. This is, or should be, a provisional "transcendence" from syntax to semantics that is justifiable as an external prosthesis only so long as it leads to a replacement that can do away with the need for it. The needed replacement is an intelligibly internalised semantics, or self-interpretation, which ISTM must be the very nub of a first-personal logic. If this can be explicated in terms of a logic that is itself emulable in computation, then - on the comp assumption that we occupy the selfsame first-personal situation - the perceptual facts of an inter-subjective concrete reality can then retroactively illuminate the theoretical framework that has explicated them. Equally, denying such facts becomes an effective nullification of the sense of any framework paradoxically adduced in their support (as in any Churchland or Dennett-style weaselling about "illusions"). I think these aspects may be so important to communicating these ideas to a wider appreciation, as opposed to a technical/professional audience, that if at all possible some Hilbert-style man-in-the-street way of encapsulating their most essential features, without involving a detailed point for point grasp of the bulk of the technicalities, would be valuable indeed. By the most essential features I mean for example the distinctions between belief (or judgement) and perception, communicability and incommunicability, formal and informal. No doubt you might point to others. The UDA, while valuable in itself, assumes the first-person position (as indeed it is entitled to do on the comp assumption) but without providing any explicit rationale for it. Of course, that is the intended function of AUDA and the machine interviews. But then that takes us immediately into the complexities of the formidable technical batteries of mathematical logic. Is it not possible that there might be some intermediate pedagogical step? David -- 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.
