On 4 June 2018 at 20:30, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On 6/4/2018 3:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >> Most scientists and scientifically-literate people I know assume that >> consciousness emerges from brain activity without ever really thinking >> about the ramifications of this hypothesis. I have had this >> conversation several times, and I can usually tell that, when asked >> certain questions, people are surprised to realize that this idea is >> not on such solid grounds as they seemed to think. > > > Would you like to share those questions?
One of the questions is: what is emergence? Is it an ontological step or an epistemological device? If you consider the classical examples: statistical physics, ecosystems, societies, markets, cities, etc. I think you will come to the conclusion that it is epistemological. We do not have enough cognitive capacity to understand the world in terms of the individual behaviors of every single human being, but we are able to perceive and reason about higher-order patterns of behavior. I know what amount of traffic to expect when I ride my bike in a bit, because I know the higher-order patterns of my city. But I also know that a sufficiently powerful intelligence could keep track of the behavior every single person in the city instead. The same goes for molecules, individual financial transactions and so on. There is a cognitive limit that is breached by what we call emergence, but in all of these cases we can go all the way down to the building blocks. This leads to my second question: if we assume emergence, then what is the building block of consciousness? I think that it is easy to see that either consciousness is qualitatively different or we haven't found the building block yet. In either case, emergentism is a very weak hypothesis, in the sense that it does not propose an explanatory mechanism (unlike all other things above). The third question that I mention is aligned with Bruno's duplication machines. If consciousness emerges from brain activity, which is finite and made of fungible entities (atoms, molecules, particles, whatever), then the same exact pattern that you are experiencing now can, in principle be repeated many or infinite times, both across time and space. What happens then? Is there some magic property that still makes you distinct across such instances? Or does it turn out that you cannot really be said to be associated with any specific chunk of matter? I'm a lot of fun at parties. Telmo. > 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.
