On 21 Dec 2017 20:46, "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]> wrote:
On 12/21/2017 12:28 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 21 Dec 2017 18:58, "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]> wrote: On 12/21/2017 3:27 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: > Hi David, > > Sometimes your responses really puzzle me Brent. What you say above almost >> makes it sound as though you just don't get the distinction Telmo is >> pointing to. But based on what you have said at other times I think you do >> get it, but because you also know that there's really no explicating that >> distinction in a purely third person way, you sometimes want to say that >> that's as far as explanation can legitimately go and the rest is just woo. >> > Actually I think of it the other way around. You and Chalmers et al are so invested in the "hard problem" being hard Please be advised that you have no sound basis for expounding on what I'm supposedly 'invested' in. For the record, I would admit to being invested in not sweeping a problem under the carpet because it's inconvenient. That said, I have no particular commitment to one style of explanation above another except to the extent that it seems to promise an advance or impediment to understanding. For my part, any disagreement between us rests wholly on those considerations, as in the present case. that you overlook the fact that almost all problems are "hard"; they have no fixed, objective ontological foundation. You're changing the subject, not for the first time. That's not the relevant sense of the term in this case, as I assumed you accepted. I said I thought you understood what clearly and categorically differentiates this problem from the ones you mention, or any other in the canon. But I'm prepared to revise my opinion if you insist. We showed that life was based on chemistry, and chemistry was based on molecular physics, which was based on atomic physics, which was based on quantum field theory, which assumes spacetime, which we don't understand. Seems hard. If we succeed in explaining spacetime in terms of entanglement of quantum states will that be the end? I doubt it. "The end" may just be the end of our grasp. Well, yes it may be. That's even a philosophical position of sorts. But my interest in Bruno's work is precisely because in my experience it's an approach to the elusive relation between the mental and the physical that seems capable of working with the relevant categories of both without ignoring or distorting either. I haven't in all honesty encountered any others about which I could say the same. That doesn't make it correct of course, but it does, in my view, render your effective dismissal of the problem area, as either illusory, irrelevant or insoluble, somewhat premature. When you write "there's really no explicating that distinction in a purely third person way" it seems analogous to a vitalist saying, "Sure, maybe life is chemistry, but that doesn't explain what it feels like to be alive." That's a distortion of the vitalist position. What you say here about the feeling of being alive is more like a restatement of the HP. Vitalism was first and foremost an inability to clearly specify and hence differentiate living and non-living processes, which seemed at a gross level of analysis to be so unlike each other as to require the intervention of an additional causal principle. When the the relation between chemistry and biology was better understood, it became apparent that this was not the case. But the matter never strayed, nor needed to, from the detailed explication of third person processes of one sort or another. Hence nothing 'vital' is thereby omitted. You're insisting that the feeling of being conscious must be explicated in a non-third person way...which is a contradiction in terms. "Explication" is a third person relation. You want an explanation but you want to keep the mystery too. It must be explicated in a way that differentiates first and third person categories in the relevant and indispensable ways. Bruno for one has given us at least a start in seeing how that could be handled at least in principle. In particular, it must show why and how the first person is not consigned, from a merely a posteriori position, to the status of an arbitrarily superadded category, as it is and must always be in any purely third person explication. Suppose it were found, in the course of my "engineering solution" that certain kinds of self referential information processing (which of course would obey Goedel's limitations) were necessary or evolutionarily favored aspects of AI. Why would that not be just as satisfactory a solution as Bruno's? Why is self reference in abstract mathematical proofs a solution, while an evolutionary explication not? That would be a very interesting result, and indeed indispensable in its own terms, but it would be indeterminate on the specifics of the relation with first person experience, except as a a brute a posteriori fact or 'identity'. If the matter can be understood satisfactorily at the level of information processing, where is one to find an a priori motivation (or prediction, if you prefer) in making contact with the category of phenomenal consciousness? This is, I think, the crux of Telmo's point. What Bruno is trying to do is radically different, ISTM, in that his schema is capable of systematically handling a logical category, possessing at least the structure of the defining peculiarities of phenomenal consciousness, as a specific a priori *prediction* of the theory. Moreover this is placed in an overall context that elucidates, at least in principle, how just such a phenomenal category gets to be inextricably 'entangled' with what I loosely called its transactional component, and hence with a consistently covarying environment. At the same time, in so doing, the role of phenomenal consciousness is reversed, from an ad hoc, tacked-on supernumerary addendum, to the indispensable 'selector' of its own mechanism of manifestation. The price of this approach is the conceptual shift from a purely transactional mode of explanation, whether couched in informational or physical terms, to one in which that mode is inextricably linked to a non-informational and non-physical dual (or as Bruno seems to prefer, polarity). I tend to agree with him that this places such a theory in the domain of a scientific theology. Speaking as one whose views, I hope, are in general fairly typical of the Scottish rationalist tradition in which I was raised, I think none the worse of it for that. Rather the opposite in fact. David Brent Which was Telmo's point. David Brent "One cannot guess the real difficulties of a problem before having solved it." --- Carl Ludwig Siegel Thanks for saying. This puzzles me too. It's not just Brent, I know a > lot of smart people that do exactly the same. > > Cute but irrelevant. As has been said when we've discussed Telmo's point in >> the past, the fact of the matter is that ontological reduction *just is* >> ontological elimination. That's the whole point of the reductive project >> and >> precisely therein lies its explanatory power. But somehow that same >> ontological reduction doesn't entail *epistemological* elimination. >> There's >> the rub. >> > Precisely. > For me, and for these reasons, emergentism in its current form is woo. > > -- 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.
