On Tue, Sep 05, 2017 at 09:40:01AM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: > > I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. When I > suggested that your idea of an observer interpreting strings was > dualist, I meant property/function dualism, not Cartesian substance > dualism. So you want an OM (bitstring) to "interpret" other > bitstrings (data). You say: "The whole point of the bitstrings is > that they are interpreted by something we call an observer." That, > in my understanding, is a dualist position -- you have two things: > an observer, and things that are observed. But if bitstrings are all > that there is, then I do not understand bitstrings "interpreting" > other bitstrings. The conscious observer consists, in this picture, > of the set of all bitstrings that are compatible with that > particular OM. There is no distinction between observer bitstrings > and data bitstrings. > > In such a picture, a different observer moment is some different set > of strings compatible with some different conscious moment. If you > are to make this into a theory of mind/consciousness, you have to > specify how these sets are related to each other to make up a > continuous stream of consciousness; or not related directly, so that > the two sets we are considering belong to different conscious > observers. > > What is it about a bitstring that makes if part of an OM? Clearly, > not all bitstrings are part of consciousness -- not all infinite > bitstrings are necessarily included in OMs. What is it about a > bitstring that makes it part of your OM?, while this other bitstring > is part of my OM? What makes one bitstring a past OM and another > bitstring a future OM? I suspect that answering questions such as > this will inevitably lead to (functional) dualism, and you will not > have actually succeeded in explaining the observer at all. > (Bitstrings would have no different role in such a theory than > quarks and electrons have in a physicalist theory: in both, > consciousness is an emergent phenomenon; emergent from the > underlying ontological substrate, but with no more fundament > explanation.)
Observation is all about interpreting data, which is what the bitstrings are. Sure, I'm assuming that all forms of data must be represented by bitstrings, but given we know of no other possibility, that is surely a rather weak assumption. OTOH - quarks and electrons are already rather structured things - having properties like like mass, spin, charge, colour charge, lepton and baryon number, all of which are presently unexplained and taken as "given". These elementary paticle properties do appear to be related to various symmetries, such as mass being the conserved property related to space-time translational symmetry - so ISTM that the path to explaining them will be to connect these symmetries to necessary properties of conscious observation - it may be that these can be derived from partitioning sets of bitstrings in the way I propose, or more may be required, such as considering how Turing machines or neural networks classify things. That remains to be seen. BTW - my goal is not to explain the observer, but to explain appearances in terms of the observer. The former is probably all to hard a nut to crack at present, but the latter might just be doable. Which is why I'm not hung up on the question of whether my theory is dualist or not. It's kind of irrelevant. (Or maybe that should be irrelephant - cf story of the blind men that I quote at the end of my book). -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected] Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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.
