On 12/21/2017 5:01 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 21 December 2017 at 11:34, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> So we are told. But what if someone could look at a recorded MRI
of you
> brain and tell you what you were thinking?
Why do you need the MRI? You can look at the text that I write and
know what I'm thinking. We've been doing that all along.
The text I write comes from my fingers hitting the keyboard, and the
fingers move in a certain pattern because the muscles are activated by
nerves that are connected to my brain and completely correlated to my
neural activity. What does the MRI add beyond precision? How does this
help solve the mystery that I am conscious, instead of a zombie?
Well put.
However if we follow Bruno in taking the antique Dream Argument as our
point of departure (which to a certain extent can be made distinct
from an explicitly computationalist hypothesis) then the question becomes:
Starting from the position that these present thoughts and sensations
(i.e. the 'waking' dream) are beyond doubt, and that they appear also
to refer to events in an externalised field of action, how does it
come to be the case that all this appears to play out in the very
particular way it does?
When the question is asked in some such way, it should perhaps not
then be unexpected that brains, nervous systems and bodies, as
intrinsic components of the field of action in question, appear
precisely to be mechanisms (in the generalised sense for now) for
translating transactions, between themselves and the remainder of that
field, into action. And also unsurprising that this continues to
generalise whatever detailed level of analysis is applied to the field
in question, whether 'narrower' or 'wider' in focus (i.e. the
consistency requirement). And further that this is just the sort of
tightly-constrained and consistent set of mechanisms that we might
expect to be picked out from an even more generalised 'mechanistic'
environment, owing to the very particular requirements of the
'self-observation' with which we began.
So far, perhaps so un-Hard. But the question then still remains of the
precise relation between the phenomena of the dream itself and the
transactional mechanisms that make their appearance within it,
including and especially the aforementioned brains. If we turn for a
moment to an analogy, it doesn't surprise us, when watching a movie
play out on an LCD screen, that the mechanism that implements this
playing out fails to resemble point for point, although is obviously
systematically correlated with, the ultimate phenomena it stimulates
the viewer into realising. But the reason of course for our lack of
surprise is that we consider the bulk of the burden of such
realisation to be shouldered by the viewer's brain, not by the LCD
device alone. So for that reason, no such loophole seems possible for
the final relation between the phenomena of the dream and the
mechanisms of the brain itself. It must somehow shoulder the final
burden of 'self-observation' and 'self-interpretation'; the matter can
no longer be 'externalised'.
Good explication. And I think I agree on the reason for the scare
quotes. The 'self-observation' by introspection is really very limited
and it seems that external observation of action tells us things about
what someone is thinking that are not available to introspection. One
of the nice things about Bruno's theory is that implies this
division...but in an extremely idealized form.
Brent
Hence to explicate the matter further, what is needed is a conceptual
apparatus - i.e. in the Western tradition, a mathematical theory -
adequate to the explication of an entirely 'internal' relation between
the dream phenomena and their transactional mechanisms. At this
point, enter the Computationalist Hypothesis, or of course any other
theory that cares to test its mettle for the purpose. ISTM that
formulating the matter in this way genuinely makes any putatively
remaining 'Hard' problems seem less intractable, at the cost of
putting the 'Aristotelian' position on matter into question (but
arguably this is already a lost cause even within physics itself).
However in a sense it's also a different form of WYSIWYG, in that the
dream always and forever is both what you see and what you get. But if
you want to study its detailed mechanisms of action you need to delve
into the realms of unobservable abstraction. The slogan might then be:
The concrete is the subjective reflection of the abstract.
David
Telmo.
--
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]
<mailto:everything-list%[email protected]>.
To post to this group, send email to
[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
Visit this group at
https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list
<https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list>.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout
<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]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
<mailto:[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.
