On 21 Dec 2017 20:47, "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]> wrote:
On 12/21/2017 12:37 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 21 Dec 2017 19:25, "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]> wrote: On 12/21/2017 5:01 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 21 December 2017 at 11:34, Telmo Menezes <[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. 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. Thanks, but bear in mind that I meant it more as a plea for clarity than charity. ;-) David Brent -- 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.
