On 4 Jun 2017 7:53 a.m., "Telmo Menezes" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Sure, we can take the same drug and talk about our experiences, and > > conclude that they were similar. And they probably were. But > ultimately, there is a language grounding problem. We have no way of > comparing qualia, private experience. I cannot even verify > experimentally that you are indeed conscious. I assume it > heuristically, that's all. > > > OK. Let me tell you how I think about it, heuristically at least, as you > say. From my first-personal perspective, 'you' - that is your body - can > only ever be said to be "conscious' in the brutely covariate sense. For that > matter, the same goes for my observation of my own body. As you say, there's > no conceivable objective test that could establish more than this. Nor - and > this is telling - would anything more than neurocognition, at least in > principle, be required to account for your, or my own, observable behaviour. I agree. > I think we need to accept that this is indeed telling us something. But > what? In my view it's telling us to stop thinking of consciousness as being > 'explained' exclusively with reference to its observable physical > correlates. IOW this is possibly a paradigm case of the distinction between > correlation and causation. Yes, this is all I'm saying too! > The alternative - shorn of its uniquely a > posteriori relation with one's own consciousness - would be in effect simply > to accept that physical behaviour is its own 'explanation'. This is the > conclusion Brent urges on us and I can respect this position without being > content with it myself. Right, I can also understand Brent's positions. One of the reasons why I am not satisfied with such a position is that consciousness appears to be unnecessary from an intelligence / Darwinian standpoint. It appears that Darwinism + neuroscience/computer science can explain the emergence of our behaviour in non-conscious zombies. It has been argued that it could be a spandrel, a by-product of the evolutionary process. I have no problem with that -- in fact I am betting this is the case, because I doubt that a non-conscious human-level intelligence is possible. But I still want to know why. Every time a problem baffles us, and people suggest that: "look, it's just a brute fact", I can't help but feel that this stance is very akin to saying "the gods did it". One of the things I like about Bruno's work is that I fell that he, at least, provides a theory on why it looks so mysterious to us. What also baffles me is why some people can't see the mystery. I don't think this is the case with Brent though, I think he is a pragmatist -- which is a perfectly reasonable thing to be. > To go beyond this, as for example Bruno is attempting to do with the comp > theory, requires an explanatory schema that somehow manages both to > transcend and encapsulate the explication of conscious phenomena in > exclusively reductive terms. And to strip this move of any sense of > arbitrariness or avoidance of the problem we also need to show that this is > a necessary consequence of situating those phenomena adequately within a > tractable theory of knowledge. Such a theory will then focus on explicating > a characteristic logic of consciousness in terms of what is perceptible or > not, what is doubtable or not, what is communicable or not, and so forth. > And of course a crucial component of this must be the relation of these > categories to the dynamics of the necessarily correlated 'physics of the > observable'. Yes, this is something I would like to see Bruno talk about more: how he hopes to derive physics from his theory. > I have no problem with theories of mind, > but I am not sure that we can expect them to be validated or refuted > in the some way that other theories can be. > > > That's right. Not in the same way, but perhaps nonetheless, in principle and > with justification, to the extent that it can be said to be explained at > all. Yes. In the end, some weirdness is to be expected. After all, the attempt to understand consciousness amounts to something creating theory on itself. After all, we only have the first-person view. The third-person view of reality is an abstraction. Independently of one's position on MWI, comp, physicalism, idealism, etc, one only knows reality in the 1p. Trying to understand consciousness is trying to understand 1p from the 1p. If logic has taught me anything, it's that once you apply something to itself, strange things happen... > >>> Indirect measures of consciousness entail hidden >>> assumptions, and it becomes easy to beg the question. >> >> >> Which particular question did you have in mind? > > For example: does consciousness in humans supervene only on brain > activity? > > > Well, in the terms I've set out: Yes if you you mean the indispensable > necessity of covariance with the observable physics, which is to say the > spectrum of perceptible externality and its theoretical ontology. No if you > mean an explanatory theory of knowledge. In the latter sense it may be said > to supervene on something explanatorily prior to the emergence of both > 'observation' and the 'observable', as for example in the comp theory. > > The usual method of detecting consciousness involve > monitoring brain activity, so they beg the question. > > > Does what I've said so far affect your possible view of the situation in any > way? Yes, I think you make an interesting distinction above. I think I agree. It's funny because I argue a lot with Brent on this, but I am not opposed to pragmatism. I love AI, and would love to know more about how to reach human-level-AI. But there is a deeper dissatisfaction that I insist on, and others (perhaps more wisely) don't. Well, we'll see . I guess i t might be worth my saying something more on the matter of "Why consciousness?". In comp terms, the explanatory relation between 'machine psychology' (i.e. a computationally-based logic of reflexive subjectivity) and perceptible dynamics (up to and including all possible observation of externalised physical behaviour) is - necessarily and quite literally - put into reverse. This puts the question of "Why consciousness?" into a quite different light. Really we ought to be asking "Why behaviour?". Comp, initially offered as a theory of mind, when followed to its conclusions is really a candidate ' T heory of Everything ' . It bears not simply on questions about perception but on the nature and origins of what is perceptible. The fractally-recursive extension of a supremely creative widget , that itself is consequent on the assumptive ontology , corresponds to the computational equivalent of a Library of Babel. I find the analogy with the Video Game version of this quite illuminating. If we were in a position to observe the productions of such a VG Library we would see an entire dramatis personae of game characters behaving in unimaginable variety and discoursing on their behaviour and its possible meanings. O ur own discourse here on the list would be precisely mirrored, indeed generalised in all its possible versions, no doubt with more incisiveness and better-founded conclusions, at least in some cases. And since such characters inevitably would also indulge in similar behavioural investigations as do we ourselves we would see them observing and cataloguing similar 'physical' phenomena and theorising about them similarly. In so doing they would apparently be observing and discoursing about what we might call their game-physics. Alas, we would be hard pressed to witness such scenes, for reasons of the practical impossibility of extrinsic discrimination of sense from rubbish that Borges gives in his original story.The situation changes profoundly though if we move from the VG to the Computational Library. The implicitly extrinsic mechanism of interpretation entailed by our imaginative reconstruction of the VG Library now moves to the 'inside' and hence to a different, deeper and more personally involving species of 'game'. Because of this, and as a consequence of the fundamental reversal referred to above, the question of extrinsic localisation of sense somewhere within the blizzard of nonsense dissolves into one of what one might call the self-localisation of the intelligible. Or at least the predominance of intelligible self-localisation within the solipsistic and highly compartmentalised psychology of the universal machine. And, just as with the simplistic VG analogy above, the many internal sub-personalities of this universal solipsist would inevitably find themselves observing and theorising about their own game-physics. Just as in the VG analogy their investigations might persuade them that this tightly-constraining physics is what underpins their own apparent ability both to observe and to negotiate an apparently externalised 'world'. IOW the requirements of the game would be such that both their behaviour and their observation of it must always appear to move consistently in lock-step. Such a stringent constraint might lead them to conclude that the precise details of both were somehow deeply implicated in their mutual co-emergence. And a profoundly constraining principle of this kind might in turn justify why just this and not some other game-physics would be likely to predominate what may now be conceived as a solipsistically monopsychic battle of sense and nonsense, consistency and incoherence, connection and fragmentation, remembering and forgetting. Or in short, a decent library of games for an eternity of play. I find that a panoramic view such as the foregoing helps to resituate for me many otherwise rather alienated questions and their consequently dubious answers with respect to consciousness, the so-called hard problem and its host of undead appurtenances. ISTM that many such apparent problems are in fact unfortunate artifacts of a faulty formulation whose most striking feature is perhaps the very notion of a primitive 'substance' itself. Hence IMO they may belong more properly in the category of 'not even wrong', as I hope the above remarks may in some way illustrate. David Telmo. > David > > > Telmo. > >> David >>> >>> >>> Telmo. >>> >>> > David >>> > >>> > In my opinion this results from equating intelligence and human >>> > experience with consciousness. Maybe that position is correct, but >>> > nobody can claim to know if this is the case. >>> > >>> > There is overwhelming evidence that the physical brain is a computer, >>> > capable of storing memories, detecting patterns, predicting the future >>> > and so on. It is also the case that human experience depends on these >>> > mechanisms. What there is no evidence for is what is conscious or not. >>> > >>> > For example, panpsychists hold that everything is conscious. I don't >>> > see how such a hypothesis can be falsified at the moment. >>> > >>> > Telmo. >>> > >>> >> -- they move in >>> >> lockstep, so if your body has decohered having obtained a particular >>> >> measurement result, all copies (if there be such) of this >>> >> consciousness >>> >> are >>> >> conscious of the same measurement result. By the identity of >>> >> indiscernibles, >>> >> there is then only one body and one consciousness. That is what QM and >>> >> MWI >>> >> tell you, any deviations are simple fantasy. >>> >> >>> >> Bruce >>> >> >>> >> >>> >> >>> >>> The apparent non-locality is then purely an artifact on making such >>> >>> assumptions about localization in branches when that's wrong to do. >>> >>> >>> >>> Saibal >>> >>> >>> >> >>> >> -- >>> >> 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. >>> > >>> > >>> > -- >>> > 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. >> >> >> -- >> 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. > > > -- > 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. 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