On 12/22/2017 2:25 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 8:11 PM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 12/21/2017 3:34 AM, Telmo Menezes 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, you can't lie to the MRI. But otherwise I agree. Except that I then
ask, "What mystery?" If having thoughts, however expressed or detected, is
consciousness then problem solved...or more accurately pushed back to why do
we believe a philosophical zombie is impossible.
Alright, I think we can agree on some important things. I would say
that we are both inclined to believe that:
"Certain configuration of matter are correlated with certain states of
consciousness, and it must be so."
Yes?
The mystery here is: why must it be so? It is a perfectly legitimate
scientific question, I would say.
Any question is legitimate if you can think of a what an answer might be
or how to test it. But haven't you ever been engage with someone who
has a naive but enthusiastic view of science and so asks lots of
questions like "Why is the speed of light constant?" or "Why are there
only two electric charges?" or "Why did the universe expand?" At the
fundamental level science doesn't answer "why" questions, because an
answer would have to invoke a more basic level (hence my virtuous circle
model of explanation). Of course you can never know that you're at the
fundamental level. The point I'm gently trying to make is that the
"hard problem of consciousness" is a why question, as you've posed it
above, and scientific progress is made by answering "how" questions.
It seems to me that people who want an answer to the "the hard problem"
are asking why can't we explain consciousness the way we explain gravity
and metabolism and atoms. I'm saying we can - it's just that all those
explanations are how explanations and so let's get some "how"
explanations of consciousness - the engineering approach.
Brent
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret,
they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct
which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes
observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct
is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
--—John von Neumann
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