On 13 Aug 2017, at 13:38, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On 13/08/2017 6:00 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 13 August 2017 at 16:48, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 13/08/2017 10:01 am, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 at 9:19 am, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
> wrote:
On 13/08/2017 9:05 am, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 13 August 2017 at 08:48, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
> wrote:
On 13/08/2017 12:04 am, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Sat, 12 Aug 2017 at 4:52 pm, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
> wrote:
On 12/08/2017 1:42 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
First person experience is individual and private. The third
person point of view is the view of an external observer.
Suppose person A is observed laughing by person B. The
behaviour - the laughing - can be observed by anyone; this is
the third person point of view. Person A might be experiencing
happiness or amusement; this is the first person point of view
and only person A himself has it. Finally, person B has visual
and auditory experiences and knowledge of the outside world
(there are laughing entities in it), and this is again from the
first person point of view. I would say that knowledge is a
type of experience, and
therefore
always first person and private; information is that which is
third person communicable. But perhaps this last point is a
matter of semantics.
If your knowledge is gained from someone else, it is necessarily
communicable information, and thus third person. First person is
your personal experience, which is not communicable. However,
knowledge gained by experience is communicable, and thus
third
person. Otherwise, all that you say above is mere logic chopping.
Most first person experiences are based on third person
information, namely sensory data.
How is sensory data 'third person information'? That would make
everything 3p, and you have eliminated the first person POV. If I
experience the pleasure of sitting in the sun on a fine spring
morning, that is surely a first person experience, and entirely
sensory in origin.
Even a priori knowledge, such mathematical knowledge, starts
with learning about the subjectvfrom outside sources.
Returning to the point, why were you claiming that the subject
on a duplication experiment cannot have first person knowledge
of duplication? That would mean no-one could ever have first
person knowledge of anything.
If you go into the duplicating machine without being told what it
is, then you are duplicated and come out in Moscow, you will know
that you have been transported from Helsinki, but how can you
know anything about any duplicates? As far as you know -- not
knowing the protocol -- you could simply have been rendered
unconscious and flown to Moscow. How does 1p experience tell the
difference?
This is why I think some 3p is being mixed in with 1p experiences
in this duplication protocol. The subject only knows the protocol
by being told about it. How does he know he is not being lied to?
This is the case with any experience whatsoever: you come to a
conclusion about what has happened based on your observations and
deductions, but you could be mistaken.
That would appear to put a large hole in Bruno's distinction
between quanta and qualia. The sensation of the sun on my face is
veridicial -- I might be mistaken about it being the sun, but the
sensation is incontrovertible. But things that I am told about are
in a different category -- I have no immediate incontrovertible
experience associated with them. I am aware of words being spoken,
but I am not immediately aware of their veracity.
You feel the Sun on your face, see the Sun in the sky and make
deductions about a hot, bright object in space. It is an analogous
process when you hear human speech and come to conclusions about
the world.
And I compare notes with other people so that I can be assured that
I am not totally deceived. Thus such knowledge becomes 3p. It is
not just what I suspect on the basis of immediate experience, but
what can be agreed among a large number of people -- those who are
independent of me.
First person, second person, and third person are basically
grammatical categories: first person, I/we, second person, you/you,
third person, him/them. The third independent person plays a
central role in the interpretation of perceptual evidence in terms
of reliable conceptual models of the world. What do you think 3p
means?
I don't think we really disagree on the distinction between first
and third person, but I don't understand your claim that there is a
special problem acquiring knowledge in duplication experiments,
which is not a problem in other experiences such as taking the train.
I think the problem I see is in the insistence that one restrict the
subjects of the duplication to first person knowledge.
Once you see what we are talking about, and that step 3 is obvious by
definition of computationalism and of first and third person, the
question is now, are you OK with step 4, and to pursue the reasoning.
The mystery here is why some people like J C. get stuck.
Their knowledge of the protocol cannot be purely 1p -- there has to
be a 3p component in that they are told the set up, and they have
sufficient background 3p knowledge to trust the operator, etc. Then,
after duplication, they also have access to 3p knowledge about both
duplicates -- they can arrange to communicate, for example. So they
can easily become aware of the fact that the person that remembers
being Helsinki man sees both Moscow and Washington. My point here is
that if you restrict them to 1p knowledge after the duplication, you
must, in order to be consistent, restrict them to just 1p knowledge
before the experiment; in which case they are necessarily unaware of
the details of the protocol and will have a different perception of
what has happened.
In the case of restriction to 1p knowledge the situation becomes
much more analogous to what happens in QM where experiments might
have multiple outcomes. In that case there is no possibility of
communication between the different branches of the wave function,
so there is genuine uncertainty about outcomes,
Why? This is pure magical thought. If there is something genuine in
play here, it cannot be digitally emulable, and your point is just
that maybe comp is false and that would be the difference between
quantum and mechanism. But this is just speculation to distract from a
theorem: if mechanism, then physicalism is false. Note that the proof
is constructive, it explains where the physical comes from, and how to
extract it from computer science/machine's theology.
and probabilities are estimated from limiting relative frequencies
in the usual way. If one derives and/or applies the Born Rule in QM,
then one can assign low probabilities to untypical sequences of
results and the like. If you mix 1p and 3p knowledge in the
duplication scenario, you lose this parallel with QM because the
analogous 3p knowledge is not available in QM.
I agree. But only Clark, and you above sadly, mix the 1P and 3p in the
duplication experience.
What you say entails the many-worlds' solution of the "solipsism"
problem: we, the neighbors of Alice, all enter the duplication box
when Alice measure her spin, so to speak. Superposition is contagious.
That is why the physical reality eventually becomes a *first* person
plural construction. I agree, with what you say here, but that is
shown to be a necessary consequence of mechanism. Both intuitively,
and mathematically. The (Löbian) Universal Machine agrees with this
point, and it generalizes a philosophical points that you can find in
the Veda, in Chinese taoist writing, in Neoplatonism, in Leibniz, in
the young Hegel, in Kant, ... It is a form of idealism in geometry and
physics. The first person in general, not necessarily only the human
one, has some role in the making of the physical reality.
Bruno
Bruce
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