On 12/21/2017 12:37 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 21 Dec 2017 19:25, "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 12/21/2017 5:01 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 21 December 2017 at 11:34, Telmo Menezes
<te...@telmomenezes.com <mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com>> 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.
I don't get it Brent. You seem to either violently agree or equally
disagree with what I say, as in the case of your other most recent
comments. Can you clarify for me what differentiates the two cases?
OK, I'll try to agree and disagree more gently.
Brent
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