On 22 Dec 2017 11:22, "Telmo Menezes" <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 2:01 PM, David Nyman <[email protected]> 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'. > > 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, excellent text. Taking the cue of your slogan (which I love), see if you agree: A possible model of what is happening is that there is an objective reality that is independent from any of us, and that is made of matter. OK, but even saying that is already assuming more than is actually warranted by the evidence, as your remarks about the epistemological circularity of emergentism point out. The more physics is successful in penetrating the mathematical structure of matter, the less like any naive version of an external 'world' it appears to be. The culmination of this is the realisation that the entirety of what we ordinarily take to be 'concrete' reality must inevitably be an epistemological construct, not an independent ontological fact, superadded to its mathematico-physical 'components'. We inhabit this reality, and the matter somehow generates the minds that dream the dream. The hard problem becomes hard because the dream takes a secondary role, and the hypothesized model is taken as the "hard truth". This model is very useful: it is a good way of thinking when one is trying to build rockets or computers. However, it should be treated as a tool and not more than that, until further notice. OK. To tackle the "hard problem", a different tool is more appropriate. This different tool puts the dream at the center of the stage. This should not sound crazy, because the dream is more real, in a sense. We experience the dream directly, while we only hypothesize the objective external world. Actually, the dream *is*, or more formally corresponds to, the epistemological reality which the mathematical theory implies or, more strongly, entails. Different questions can be asked of this model, for example: how does the presentation of an objective external world made of matter arise at the intersection of our dreams? Does this go in the direction of what you are saying? Yes. Bruno has sometimes characterised this as objective idealism. It takes the basic idealistic intuition and connects it with reason via an objective notion of mechanism. And in so doing, it holds out the hope of doing adequate service to both the epistemological and ontological components of the theory, without distorting, trivialising, or dismissing either. Perhaps the most elusive insight in the philosophy of mind is that neither of these components is truly separable or coherently eliminable from a viable theory of ultimate origins (aka TOE). Consequently a successful theory of mind cannot be a last-ditch addendum, a sort of cherry on the cake, to an otherwise completed 'TOE'. The 'fire' of which Hawking has memorably spoken is, in a subtle but crucial sense, already present at the origin. David Telmo. > 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]. >> 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. 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